miHoYo Co., Ltd. (米哈游) is a Shanghai-based game developer best known internationally for Genshin Impact (released September 2020) and the Honkai franchise. It was formally established in February 2012 by Cai Haoyu (蔡浩宇), Liu Wei (刘伟), and Luo Yuhao (罗宇皓).
The company later created the global publishing and branding label HoYoverse for markets outside Greater China, launched in February 2022 and operated via Singapore-registered Cognosphere Pte. Ltd. (incorporated July 2021). The company stated that HoYoverse would handle global publishing and technology research and operate through offices including Montreal, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Seoul, and Singapore, with a Singapore headquarters office announced in July 2022.
Because miHoYo is privately held, comprehensive audited financial statements are not publicly available. Widely reported remarks from early 2021 quote Cai as saying 2020 revenue exceeded RMB 5 billion (about US$770–780 million at the time) and as framing a long-term ambition to build a virtual world that one billion people would want to live in by 2030; this should be treated as an aspirational vision rather than a measurable business commitment. For Genshin Impact specifically, third-party mobile market trackers have reported multi-billion-dollar lifetime player spending on iOS and Google Play within its first two years, while total cross-platform revenue is not publicly disclosed.
In the narrower “digital human” sense of humanlike, real-time interactive virtual beings, miHoYo’s most consistently documented example is the virtual streamer yoyo Lumi (鹿鸣/Lumi). She was introduced in connection with the company’s Artificial Desktop (人工桌面) Windows live-wallpaper app and later brought to wider public attention through a Bilibili livestream debut on July 15, 2022 that Chinese tech and XR media described as real-time rendered performance with motion-capture-driven facial and body animation and interactive segments. Descriptions of the underlying stack often reference Unreal Engine and AI voice components, but detailed, independently verified technical specifications and training-data provenance have not been publicly disclosed.
Alongside Lumi’s public-facing role, credible Chinese reporting has described an internal AI effort commonly referred to as the “Inverse Entropy/Anti-Entropy” (逆熵) research team or department, with company leadership quoted as saying it was established in 2018 to apply deep learning to improve content production efficiency and enable experiences that traditional methods could not easily deliver. More recent mainstream tech reporting indicates miHoYo completed a formal registration for a model named “Glossa” in September 2024 under China’s large-model regulatory filing system, while public details about the model’s capabilities, deployment scope, and productization remain limited.
For external ecosystem links, NVIDIA’s January 2024 announcements around its ACE digital-character microservices named miHoYo/HoYoverse among developers adopting or exploring these speech-and-animation building blocks, including technologies such as Audio2Face and Riva. That level of disclosure does not by itself confirm that any specific HoYoverse title has shipped ACE-driven conversational NPCs or that players can currently access open-ended, real-time dialogue in released games.
Finally, leadership and spinout narratives should be stated narrowly. Cai Haoyu stepped down from miHoYo’s chairman and legal representative roles in September 2023 with Liu Wei taking over those positions, and major business media later reported that Cai founded a California-based AI game studio, Anuttacon, in 2024 and revealed Whispers from the Star in March 2025 as an AI-driven interactive narrative centered on real-time conversation with a character named Stella. Beyond the existence of the studio and its publicly shown materials, stronger claims about multimodal sensing, large-scale adoption, or quantified production gains are best treated as company descriptions or secondary interpretations unless backed by primary disclosures or detailed, independently corroborated technical documentation.
2026
2026-01-13: miHoYo is an angel investor in MiniMax; MiniMax listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on January 9.
2026-01-07: miHoYo participated in MiniMax’s US$31 million angel financing round.
2026-01-06: miHoYo is an early shareholder in MiniMax; asset value was calculated using intraday pricing.
2026-01-01: miHoYo co-founder Cai Haoyu’s Anuttacon launched an AI chat website called AnuNeko.
2025
2025-12-30: miHoYo co-founder Cai Haoyu launched Whispers from the Star.
2025-12-26: miHoYo co-founder Cai Haoyu’s Anuttacon launched an AI chat website called AnuNeko.
2025-12-10: miHoYo appears as Shanghai miHoYo Network Technology Co., Ltd. with the slogan “Tech otaku save the world.”
2025-12-09: miHoYo established an Inverse Entropy Studio in 2018 for the virtual digital human Luming and brain–computer interface projects; miHoYo invested in a hospital brain center in 2021.
2025-12-04: miHoYo’s prior technical accumulation in the digital human Luming was linked to a 31-minute gameplay demo showing city NPCs with stronger AI-driven behavior.
2025-12-02: miHoYo’s prior technical accumulation in the digital human Luming was linked to a 31-minute gameplay demo showing city NPCs with stronger AI-driven behavior.
2025-11-24: miHoYo said AIGC applications cover 2D design, 3D modeling, animation production, font generation, and digital-human development.
2025-11-24: miHoYo accumulated since 2019 a technical and style route tied to the Luming digital human, in discussion of Varsapura.
2025-11-21: miHoYo is regarded as a purely game company and expands its footprint on a per-project basis.
2025-11-15: miHoYo Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. posted a job listing preferring digital-human-related technical familiarity and digital-human development experience.
2025-11-14: miHoYo responded to leaks of unreleased content involving games including Genshin Impact.
2025-09-30: miHoYo received a domestic game licence listing for Honkai: Yin Yuan Jing Ling.
2025-09-28: miHoYo’s Inverse Entropy team developed the female digital human yoyo Luming_Lumi in 2020; yoyo Luming_Lumi surpassed 1.7 million Bilibili followers; the first online livestream occurred in 2022.
2025-09-14: miHoYo established Shanghai miHoYo Wudinggu Technology Co., Ltd. on July 16 with registered capital of 500 million RMB.
2025-09-12: miHoYo set up Shanghai miHoYo Baizhandi Technology Co., Ltd. and Shanghai miHoYo Daohaisangtian Technology Co., Ltd.; legal representative Yu Chenxi; registered capital 10 million RMB each.
2025-08-27: miHoYo invested in MiniMax; miHoYo formed an Inverse Entropy research department in 2018–2020; miHoYo developed a large model called Glossa; miHoYo created the digital human Luming.
2025-08-15: miHoYo registered the Varsapura trademark in multiple countries via Cognosphere.
2025-07-19: miHoYo began engaging in AI in 2018 by establishing an Inverse Entropy research department; miHoYo has a self-developed large model called Glossa; the digital human Luming had its first online livestream in 2022.
2025-07-17: miHoYo launched the virtual idol Luming in 2022 with speech synthesis, motion driving, and expression simulation; real-time livestream interaction with dynamic feedback occurred.
2025-07-07: miHoYo launched a digital human called Xiaoqu for intelligent customer service using a large language model combined with RAG technology and a local Q&A library.
2025-06-30: miHoYo appears as Shanghai miHoYo Mifa Technology Co., Ltd.
2025-06-26: miHoYo is Shanghai-headquartered and valued at 180 billion RMB in an AR/VR/MR context, attributed to Genshin Impact.
2025-05-12: miHoYo aimed to build a complex including a digital-human virtual experience store.
2025-04-08: miHoYo may strengthen AI R&D including NPC interaction algorithms and a digital-human engine.
2025-03-21: miHoYo’s earlier work on Luming was linked to digital-human technology use in a Cai Haoyu-led AI game.
2025-03-18: miHoYo founder Cai Haoyu’s AI game company Anuttacon exposed a new AI game with large-model digital-human real-time interaction and public test recruitment.
2025-03-16: miHoYo founder Cai Haoyu’s AI game includes large-model-driven digital-human real-time interaction, player-defined open plot, closed testing, and the line “Your dialogue determines her fate,” naming Whispers From The Star.
2025-03-15: miHoYo founder Cai Haoyu’s AI game includes large-model-driven digital-human real-time interaction, player-defined open plot, and closed testing.
2025-02-28: miHoYo appears in court text stating resale evidence to Shanghai University of Technology and miHoYo.