Fuzozo and BubblePal: Chinese start-ups that sold hundreds of thousands of talking plush toys

Two Chinese start-ups put large language models into a clip-on pendant and a plush toy. Both have sold hundreds of thousands of units, but neither has said how long people keep using them.

Two start-ups put language models into plush toys

BubblePal is a pendant about the size of a ping-pong ball, which Haivivi launched in China in June 2024. Clipped onto a plush toy a child already owns, it makes the toy talk in a character's voice. Parents manage the characters and conversations through an app. CEO Li Yong previously worked on the Tmall Genie team. Fuzozo is a keychain-sized plush toy that Robopoet showed at MWC in March 2025. Its founder, Sun Zhaozhi, had led product design at XPeng's robotics unit. Fuzozo offers voice chat that reads emotion, long-term memory and nurturing play, and costs ¥399.

Hundreds of thousands sold in little over a year

BubblePal sold more than 10,000 units in its first month. One report says monthly sales grew two- to threefold after DeepSeek arrived in early 2025. Reported cumulative sales are 200,000–250,000 or more (sources differ). It was also sold in the US, Canada and the UK. Haivivi raised a Series A in August 2025 and released a second-generation product, CocoMate, at ¥799 the same month. Fuzozo was reported to have sold about 300,000 units in China by June 2026. After an angel round in 2025, Robopoet raised a ¥100M pre-A round in 2026 from investors including Tuya. At CES 2026 it showed a cellular version with Tuya.

A child bored in five minutes, adults talking for fifty

Parents in Beijing told MIT Technology Review that BubblePal's answers ran long, that it struggled to understand children's speech and that their children soon lost interest. One parent said it was “just like one of the many toys that my daughter plays for five minutes then gets tired of.” About 80% of Fuzozo's users are reported to be women, with average daily use of about 50 minutes. Users on Xiaohongshu called Fuzozo an electronic chatterbox. 36Kr's editors found its mandatory daily tasks and sudden attention-seeking sounds tiring. Neither company has published return or retention rates.

The same technology, a different place in children's and adults' lives

The two products use similar technology but sit in different places. BubblePal took the place of a child's toy and ran into children's short attention spans. Fuzozo sold as an accessory that young adults hang on their bags. Small bodies and low prices keep the hardware burden far below that of robots like Jibo or Moxie. Because the conversation depends on outside language models, however, they could lose their functions like Moxie did if the company stops. 36Kr reported that of the 40–50 AI toy founders it spoke to, only two or three were still in business.

After the first few days, what reason does the user have to talk to this product again?

What we haven’t confirmed