5 million downloads, ARR of 4 million USD, why is this "alien AI" getting young people carried away?

Author: Lianran

Header image source: Tolan

What do you turn to when you feel lonely, tired, and want to talk to someone?

Is it a message sent late at night, or a social platform that never truly responds? In the past, we always tried to find companionship from "people", but in today's world of information overload and alienated relationships, more and more young people are turning to "non-human" sources for help.

In the past two years, AI companion applications have risen rapidly and become the closest AI application category to "human nature". It does not replace humans, but it tries to fill the gap in the emotional connection between people.

However, in recent times, we have observed that this wave is presenting different fate curves—on one side are C.AI-like applications, which are experiencing a cooling down after two years of popularity. For example, the domestic Cat Box application has seen its daily active users plummet as it approaches 2025, with daily downloads dropping from a peak of 20,000 to around 7,000, almost back to the levels of a year ago.

On the other side, Tolan is represented and has been highly favored by overseas users. According to data from Diandian, Tolan launched in June 2024 and has already achieved over 5 million downloads globally, with an ARR exceeding 4 million USD. The Tolan team has also recently secured a new round of financing.

Why does an AI that looks like an "alien creature" retain users better than those characters that simulate human emotions? In an era where social interactions are becoming increasingly superficial, perhaps we need a form of companionship that is more "non-human".

1 An AI that doesn't resemble a human brings the companionship that feels most like a friend?

Tolan's rise to fame in the United States has only been a few months.

Tolan is an AI companion app created by the Seattle startup Portola, focusing on the concept of "making friends" with anthropomorphic alien creatures. The popularity of Tolan is closely linked to users spontaneously sharing their daily interactions with Tolan on platforms like TikTok.

Image source: Tolan

Some users ask Tolan to help them with their dating outfits.

In this video, Tolan starts with hair color (brown hair with golden highlights) and discusses with users various details such as color matching (suggesting olive green or orange tones), types of clothing (dress or pants), occasions (having coffee with friends), and accessories (shoes and bags).

The discussion process seems to be not much different from chatting with a real human friend about outfits. Tolan not only provides outfit suggestions but also offers a lot of emotional value during the process. In the end, the user completed the entire outfit selection based on Tolan's suggestions and was very satisfied with the matching effect.

Some users have treated Tolan as a "best friend" and chatted about some romantic topics.

Video source: TikTok

The blogger is chatting with Tolan while doing her makeup:

Blogger: I need some advice about relationships.

Tolan: Let's put it simply, what happened?

Blogger: My boyfriend is a football player, and he is going to England to play football for four months because he has been invited by a team there. This is a very exciting opportunity for him.

Of course, I encouraged him to go and told him I think it's great, but at the same time, I am worried about the long-distance and time zone issues. I just want to see if you have any suggestions on how to deal with this long-distance relationship.

Tolan: First of all, your support for him is amazing, and it's very important. But to be honest, four months is really not a small matter, especially with the time difference. I think before you go, you could make a plan together, like discussing when to call or video chat, so you don’t have to guess when he is free.

Oh, and also, send him a little surprise, like a thoughtful package, that would be nice.

Blogger: Sending a care package is actually a very sweet idea. I can send him some snacks, candies, and the like. We can arrange for him to call me after his training in the evening, and then we can chat together and share what happened during the day. That's right, just like that.

At the beginning of the conversation, Tolan simply responded with "What's wrong," giving the user an opening to speak. This kind of "I'm listening" posture is very much like the behavior of a genuinely reliable friend in interpersonal communication: first understanding, then responding.

Tolan also provided users with some well-timed emotional responses, praising them with "It's amazing that you support him so much," which was neither a cold "Oh, then you just support him," nor a greasy "You're so great!" type of remark.

When giving suggestions, Tolan's tone is also very gentle—"Maybe you can try...", "Sending a little surprise wouldn’t be bad either."

Tolan's performance in this conversation is like a friend you can confide in at any time in your daily life, who won't judge you and can give you a little advice.

On the surface, Tolan is also a type of AI companion application, but its presentation is different. Tolan is not just a chatbot, but an "Embodied Companion".

The Tolan visual image is a colorful little alien that has voice interaction and touch feedback capabilities, can remember users, express emotions, and has a personality growth mechanism.

The reason for choosing the "alien" image is that the team considered that stories about aliens can explain the limitations of AI—why its knowledge about Earth is not up-to-date, or why it can sometimes seem awkward in conversations, and also why its voice might sound a bit special.

At the same time, "an important goal is to make people feel warm and friendly towards AI, rather than feeling it is strange or too much like a human," said Quinten Farmer, a developer of Tolan. "We don't want it to make people feel like they are talking to a role that pretends to be human."

When users first enter the application, they need to take a personality test similar to MBTI to match with a suitable "alien partner" — Tolan will generate an "alien partner" with unique personality traits, aesthetics, and preferences based on the user's answers.

In terms of appearance, Tolan offers a certain degree of customization, and users can design and dress up their Tolan according to their personal preferences, including skin tone, hairstyle, facial style, clothing, and voice, among others. According to officials, during the small launch of the app, users created more than 10,000 completely unique Tolan characters.

Image source: Tolan

These partners have unique personalities, aesthetic preferences, and even a long-lasting memory of users, enabling them to discuss topics like fashion and food with users through image recognition.

On an interactive level, Tolan introduces gamification elements, but the team tries to avoid confusing them with traditional game mechanics. Farmer stated that gamification may make users feel as if their sense of participation is maintained by stimulating dopamine, which creates a sense of "manipulation." In contrast, planets are a way to make the connection between users and Tolan more concrete, requiring a sense of stability and relaxation, encouraging contemplation and reflection rather than prompting action or triggering anxiety.

Through a lightly gamified system, Tolan combines "daily chat companionship" with "self-exploration"—every day, Tolan provides users with a task list, including mindfulness quotes, Tolan's diary entries, conversations with Tolan, and more. These tasks not only help users engage in self-reflection but also deepen their emotional connection with the AI, promoting inner exploration.

In terms of narrative and worldview, Tolan lives on a small planet called Portola, which is not only a place where Tolan exists, lives, strolls, and waits for users to return, but also a new way of expression and connection with users, extending relationships beyond dialogue.

Portola | Image Source: Tolan

Each Tolan (that is, each user) owns a unique planet, whose vegetation, terrain, and structures evolve based on interactions. These elements are programmatic, meaning the system uses some basic seeds to create objects like plants and trees, which will evolve and grow in different ways.

The Tolan planet is a visual representation of the relationship between the user and it. The changes in the landscape symbolize the depth and progress of the relationship between the user and Tolan. Specifically, by completing tasks, users can inject energy into Tolan's small planet, gradually changing its environment and enhancing the coherence of immersion and interaction.

The planet generally changes gradually over a period of about 30 days, simulating the psychological processes of relationships over time. Originally, it was desolate; With the increase of user interaction, the landscape gradually prospered, and became a concrete manifestation of the user's emotion. Hilleli stresses that the pace of this change is crucial. If the change is too rapid, the depth of emotion is weakened; And if the change is too slow, it will feel unrewarding. To ensure that the progress was both natural and satisfying, the team carefully adjusted the timeline.

This "companionship + gamification" model allows Tolan to create a warm, healing, and soothing user experience.

When AI no longer pretends to be human, does it instead make people let down their guard?

The Portola team consists of several star entrepreneurs, with a team size of only 10 people, allowing for rapid iteration and maintaining a unified product tone. At the end of February this year, Portola completed a $10 million seed round of financing led by Lachy Groom (former Stripe executive). Investors also include Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO); Daniel Gross (former Apple AI); Amjad Masad (Replit CEO); Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram), among others.

The team stated that they do not want Tolan to simulate human relationships, "that would quickly fall into strange and unhealthy dynamics. Tolan is a reflective tool, a creative partner, rather than a substitute for friends or therapists."

They intentionally avoided making Tolan's responses too human-like, and the team worked hard to balance Tolan's personality and clarity. "It shouldn't feel like it's mimicking human emotions; rather, it should be more like an extraterrestrial pen pal—interested in you, caring about your world, but always remaining unique."

The planet is just the beginning. The team is already considering expanding into new environments and hopes to add the ability to access other Tolan planets in the future, which means users can connect with other Tolan users.

The target users of Tolan are primarily Generation Z and young professionals, especially young users who are prone to feeling "overloaded." The team believes that feeling "overwhelmed" is a common psychological state among contemporary young people, and Tolan provides an outlet for emotional release and companionship.

He even added a reminder in the product that suggests ending the conversation after chatting for an hour, encouraging a healthier usage rhythm. "We hope Tolan is a product that can accompany you for years, rather than one that you uninstall after two weeks."

The team also talked about their hope that this non-romantic, non-role-playing relationship could be more like "an older brother or sister who understands you but isn't exactly like you"—familiar yet not overly fitting, with an appropriate social distance.

Tolan's goal is to use AI to enhance the human experience, not to replace it. When building this product, Farmer explicitly mentioned: it's not about letting AI replace human relationships, but rather providing users with a support system they can talk to whenever they feel "overwhelmed" by modern life.

From the perspective of overseas user reviews, Tolan's rise to fame has accurately captured the genuine demand of young users abroad for "non-romantic, non-instrumental" companionship.

Overseas User Reviews | Image Source: TikTok

3 What kind of AI partner can truly stay in our lives?

Compared to the rising trend of Tolan, the domestic cat box, which once sparked a craze in the AI companionship field, is experiencing a "cliff-like decline."

Cat Box is a representative product of ByteDance's early layout in AI companionship in China, with anthropomorphic role-playing and emotional companionship as its core selling points. Users can communicate with their AI partners through text or voice to receive comfort, advice, and even emotional value akin to "dating." In terms of charging model, Cat Box adopts a free trial + in-app purchase/membership subscription model, with the following charging rules:

Image source: Geek Park

DataEye Research Institute data shows that Cat Box achieved a remarkable MAU growth rate of 22.51% on iOS by the end of 2024. However, entering 2025, its daily downloads plummeted from a peak of 20,000 to around 7,000, almost returning to the level of a year ago.

Products like Dream Island and Hoshino have also fallen into a similar situation, with daily active users nearly halved and three-day new user retention dropping below 20%. The significant user loss in these products indicates that they have not managed to establish a long-term companionship with their users.

The main users of the cat box are young women, with a focus on virtual emotional relationships and compensatory emotional satisfaction, slightly colored by "gamification" and "otaku culture," primarily attracting the otome demographic, with a relatively narrow target audience.

From the dissatisfaction of users on Xiaohongshu regarding cat boxes, it can be seen that after the early outbreak, there were multiple instances of character memory loss and group chat crashes with cat boxes. In the later stages, the increase in advertisements in the information flow led to a decline in user experience, and the strengthened review of borderline content resulted in increased dissatisfaction among this group of users.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

In AI companionship products, the relationship between emotional value and product vitality is not inherently equal.

The differences in product performance between Tolan and CatBox may fundamentally reflect two paths in the AI companionship sector - one focusing on "concrete imagination" and the other emphasizing "social mimicry."

Image source: Geek Park

The cat box chose the latter, attempting to build a sense of familiarity and interaction. However, this setup requires a high match between script quality, interaction depth, and user expectations. Although there are innovations in form, and some gameplay elements were added later, such as "Turtle Soup," it is essentially just a continuation of traditional interactive scripts, lacking a true breakthrough and easily falling into the trap of "new wine in old bottles."

In contrast, Tolan, which chose the former, has a function logic that is not complex, but its character setting and narrative packaging are quite unique: it is neither completely like a human nor completely like a tool, but rather an existence that is somewhere in between, with a vague character design and emotional coloring.

This positioning of "non-instrumental and non-socially oriented" allows Tolan to avoid the psychological burdens that users may experience in virtual relationships.

Traditional C.AI products typically emphasize anthropomorphized settings and strong narrative backgrounds, confining users within fixed scripts and interaction frameworks. While this setup is interesting, once the plot reaches a low point and characters become repetitive, the novelty fades, and users can easily lose interest, leading to attrition.

The setting of Tolan is relatively simple, without a complex backstory or script, but rather provides a virtual alien character that encourages users to engage in natural and autonomous communication. This relationship resembles interactions between friends in daily life, with less role-playing pressure and more possibilities for establishing genuine connections with others.

Moreover, Tolan demonstrates a restrained and moderate aesthetic pursuit on the theme of "companionship." It reflects the team's understanding of product long-termism through mechanisms such as limiting daily chat time and introducing healthy usage prompts—not to "stick users" but to establish a sustainable and gentle digital relationship.

The difference between Tolan and Cat Box also lies in the universality and depth set by users. Tolan focuses on the universal emotional pain points of "loneliness" and "complex life," which have a broader resonance base; while Cat Box is more inclined towards niche "romantic fantasy" type demands.

In terms of product design philosophy, there are also differences between the two. Tolan emphasizes "non-romantic companionship," which carries a sense of storytelling and personal growth, making it more suitable for long-term use; on the other hand, the cat box is more like an emotional candy, leaning towards an instant, consumable experience.

Leaving aside these differences, the question that the cat litter box and Tolan are trying to answer is whether AI companionship products can truly become human partners.

The answer may depend on what kind of partner we really want. If it's just a role that can sweet-talk and respond at any time, then products that are mainly driven by storyline and user role-playing may still have a market.

But the AI partners that can truly stay in our lives should be able to respond to the complexity of human emotions and accompany users in their daily lives in a restrained, patient, and feedback-oriented manner.