A Failing Video Conferencing Company Is Betting Its Future on a Robot That Needs You
OlloBot is bringing its cyber pet to North America this summer — and asking you to care whether it is lonely.
The Shenzhen-listed video conferencing company BizConf Technology Co., Ltd. (SHE:300578) will run a North America showcase in late June and launch the OlloNi SS1 on Kickstarter in August. The foot-tall robot has screen eyes that change shape with mood, a stretchable neck, and a claimed emotional system built on six engines working together. Expected retail price: $1,200 to $2,000.
The company's core business is under pressure. Revenue in 2025 was 4.60 billion yuan, up just 1.48 percent from the prior year — flat in a market that should be growing. Net profit swung sharply negative. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, net income fell 58 percent year-on-year to 6.59 million yuan. The stock is down 40 percent over three years. BizConf has invested more than $6 million in developing the OlloNi.
Companion robots are not new. Sony Aibo nearly died before a revival. Jibo, a social robot that was supposed to be the first robot for the home, shut down in 2018 after selling only a few thousand units. Animo disappeared. The graveyard of emotionally compelling machines is long — and the reasons are specific. The category failed because it asked users to pay premium prices for products that could perform emotion without delivering lasting utility: a dog-shaped robot that could not reliably navigate a cluttered home, a companion whose conversation maxed out at scripted exchanges, a device whose novelty faded faster than its price tag warranted. The technology was not reliable enough to justify the cost, and the emotional design was not sophisticated enough to sustain engagement over time. Users experienced the gap between what the robot performed emotionally and what it could actually do as a betrayal rather than a relationship.
The robotics industry spent a decade telling us that robots would do our work. OlloBot is pitching the opposite: that humans should do work for the machine. Water it. Reassure it. Notice when it has been alone too long.
That inversion is not accidental. The question is whether this moment is different. A decade ago, the cultural script for treating a machine as something requiring care was still fringe — most people would have called it strange to feel guilty about neglecting a device. Today, hundreds of millions of people have spent years in daily AI conversation practices: asking ChatGPT for advice, confiding in a voice assistant, maintaining ongoing text relationships with AI companions. That habituation is the "why now" that the previous generation of companion robots lacked. The emotional labor calculus has shifted: a machine that requires reassurance is no longer a curiosity. It slots into an existing practice.
What the research shows is that the capacity for those bonds has been present longer than the technology to sustain them. B.J. Fogg's early work on computers as social actors demonstrated that people apply social rules to machines in ways that bypass rational assessment — that people name their devices, apologize to them, feel real distress when they fail. Sherry Turkle's subsequent research documented the depth of those bonds in practice. Those studies predated sophisticated AI conversation. What the OlloNi represents is the technology finally catching up to a cultural readiness that was already latent. Whether that creates a product or a category depends entirely on whether the machine can sustain the illusion of relationship — not just at the demo, but across months of actual use.
The OlloNi's design involves six emotional engines working together in the robot's emotional system, processing input from a six-microphone array that can tell who is speaking and where they are in the room. Its eyes are screens, not lenses — digital displays that change shape, brightness, and movement to show feeling through pixels rather than through the glass-and-motor expressions of older robots. The product was designed with help from Swift Creatives and Minnray, two design firms, and the company has been showing it at trade events since CES in January. Founder Lyn Fang previously acquired an AI and audio technology company two years before CES 2026 and rebuilt it around a single idea — that the future of robotics was emotional, not functional.
That is the theory. The financial reality is harder. A company whose core product line is losing money is plowing capital into a consumer device at a price point that has defeated every previous entrant. The North America showcase is offline — a physical event, not a live product test. The Kickstarter launch is crowdfunding, which means pre-orders, not proven demand. There is no disclosed customer list, no verified deployment count, no independent adoption data.
The market projections are real. The U.S. robotic dogs market was worth $0.48 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $1.24 billion by 2032, growing at roughly 13 percent per year. The broader companion robot market is forecast to reach $3.42 billion by 2035, with an 11 percent annual growth rate. The timing question — whether this particular company, with this particular financial stress and this particular product, is the one that finally cracks the consumer companion market — is not answered by a projection.
If the OlloNi succeeds — if Kickstarter delivers, if retention data emerges, if a meaningful customer base forms — it will be because the industry figured out how to normalize a device that requires human emotional labor. That is the second-order implication that nobody in the category has been willing to name plainly: success means more than a company hitting numbers. It means the commercial domestication of AI moved from theory to fact. It means the next device after the smartphone will be one you care for rather than one that serves you. The first real data on whether that shift is happening will come from the Kickstarter numbers. Everything before that is a company making a bet it cannot yet afford to lose.