Originally witten in Chinese by Wang Zhichen Source: kouailiyu (Wechat ID: akuailiyu)
Recently, Huleen announced the closing of angel round funding from Volcanics Venture exclusively. This round of funding will be used to develop product, mobile app, and marketing campaign.
Huleen from Shanghai Smoothnip Co., Ltd. was founded in 2019. The team members come from Pinduoduo, Alibaba DAMO Academy, and other China first-tier enterprises. Huleen was in private beta in 2020 and is scheduled for the second half of the 2021 release.
In the first half of 2020, Roam introduced the concept of "networked thought," it designed to creat a document based on a keyword through shortcut, which realized the association amony abstraction knowledge. Zhang Ruinan, the founder of Huleen, said this is the beginning of a new era of note-taking products, it could become a tool that aggregate abstract information and inspire people to present knowledge systematically according to one's free will.
With the rapid development of 5G network and short video platform quicly lead to amount escalation of information. With the enormous expansion in the number of information, our brain has been fully occupied, so it becomes more and more difficult for us to bear the pressure of information and knowledge.
Zhang Ruinan said these pressures may come from three aspects: first, the information explosion. With the development of the Internet in recent decades, the dissemination of information is basically unrestrained, and the amount of it has expanded to the extent that the human brain cannot process. Second, because of the information hoarding, people began to rely on various information tools and memos. However, compared to information hoarding, information organization bothers people more.
The third is the information island. Due to the information accumulation, our brain can not quickly retrieve or establish the connection between information. As a result, people are more dependent on recommendation or search algorithm, which leads to critical thinking skills to be lacking in a lot of people. Zhang Ruinan said, in the Post Internet era, some of us might be overwhelmed by the high-density of knowledge and information, or spend their whole life wandering in a narrow field of knowledge, or idling about the content pushed by algorithms.
In fact, what we need is not only a tool to store information, but also a tool to help us aggregate information, inspire us to think and present information according to our free will. Huleen born for this, a "Super Brain" that really belongs to us.
Huleen is not a simple two-way connection note product. Unlike Roam and other products, in Huleen, you can link more content other than your own notes, Huleen hope to become connection that could link everything for real.
Zhang Ruinan said that Huleen could be applied in many scenarios. For example, Huleen could establish association between documents and blog, office documents, personal collections (such as wechat, Zhihu, etc.), and even take notes while watching bilibili. Huleen transform the static documents to a new knowledge structure of interlinkage, a "Super Brain." This could help many office workers and students to solve the information organziation and achieve real information management.
When talking about the potential market scale, Zhang Ruinan said that based on the seed users' portraits' analysis, the potential scenarios of Huleen are respectively focused on learning, personal notes, consultation and analysis. According to incomplete statistics, the total amount of personal cloud notes user is about 85 million to 90 million, and the market growth rate is about 1.3 million to 1.4 million users per month. The market scale is very large. Amony writers, lawyers, content creators, college students, amateur researchers, and geeks, Huleen could be widely used..
In the future, Huleen will continue to iteration and strive to become a super brain. Zhang Ruinan said the team is also developing mobile app, which will serve users in a more diversified product form.
When it comes to investment logic, Zhang Suyang, the managing partner of Volcanics Venture, said that Volcanics Venture has focused on the new generation of collaborative efficiency tools constantly. With the popularity of telecommuting and online learning, users' demand for information collation and recording is also increasing. At the same time, we noticed that some overseas tool products had already broken the limitations of documents and tables, they evolved into applications that adapt to different scenarios. People's pursuit of information arrangement and processing in their own ways is very strong and persistent. We believe that Huleen no matter the concept or scenarios, could meet different people's needs of information collation and creation.