At today’s XIN Summit, SeaPal emerged as one of the standout highlights of the Fund at First Pitch finale, opening the event with its AI-powered early childhood education product and immediately capturing the audience’s attention. Building on SeaPal’s core concept, the session also featured four other startups from frontier technology domains: Sengine AI, BIAI, Fluorion, and Yuanmeng Interstellar.
Although the five companies operate in different fields, SeaPal made the strongest first impression. Its presentation demonstrated a warm, human-centered approach to applying technology to real-world problems, setting the tone for the entire session.
More broadly, this year’s Fund at First Pitch finale reflected a shared direction among a new generation of Chinese startups: pushing the boundaries of technology while actively exploring global markets, seeking differentiated entry points and sustainable competitiveness on the international stage.
AI interactive fish tank SeaPal for children aged three to six
Aquarius Tech, an early-stage team focused on early childhood education, showcased its first product at the summit: SeaPal, an AI interactive fish tank designed for children aged three to six. Combining ergonomics, behavioral habits, and natural learning scenarios, SeaPal allows children to develop empathy, observational skills, and basic scientific understanding through the low-barrier experience of caring for fish.
The team believes that in an era of increasingly powerful AI, the next generation needs not just memorized knowledge or procedural skills, but core human abilities that are harder for technology to replicate—such as empathy, emotional awareness, and communication. Based on this concept, they combine “life education” with AI guidance, enabling children to perform tasks such as changing water, observing fish behavior, and understanding the needs of living creatures through contextualized prompts.
To ensure children can independently care for the fish, the team designed SeaPal with careful attention to engineering details. The tank height is based on children’s arm length, the water-changing device weighs less than two bottles of mineral water to allow children aged three to six to handle it, and each water change replaces one-quarter of the tank’s volume, ensuring both safety and manageability.
Beyond AI-guided interaction, SeaPal includes emotion recognition and proactive companionship features. A front-facing camera captures children’s expressions and emotional states, and the AI responds with stories, educational content, or language cues. For busy families, the system records daily interactions and sends them to parents, helping them understand their child’s emotions and interests.
Aquarius Tech emphasizes that SeaPal is not merely an AI conversation tool, but a sustainable educational platform that brings natural learning scenarios into the home. Through landscape creation, hands-on design modules, and natural science content, it encourages children to develop manual skills, aesthetic awareness, and creativity while observing, caring for, and interacting with life.
In the future, this “life education + AI guidance” approach could expand to include other low-maintenance small creatures, such as hamsters or starfish, according to the team. It would extend natural education from a single product to a full series of scenarios and gradually build a comprehensive early childhood education system.
