The company hopes to charm the market with its profitable dating business built around Yidui, a live video app where hosts get paid to help awkward users break the ice

image credit: Bamboo Works

Key Takeaways

  • Milian has filed for an IPO, building its business by turning traditional matchmaking into a scalable online role using live three-way video chats
  • Its rise comes as rival Hello Group deals with tax trouble and a yearslong user decline, while Soulgate makes its own listing attempt with an AI-heavy emotional-economy pitch

In a room on the Yidui dating service, romance doesn't begin with a swipe, but rather with an unlikely third-wheel to grease the often-awkward process of meeting someone new. The Chinese dating and social app is built around live, three-way video chats, where a host sits above two users on the screen and helps to keep the conversation moving. Part ice-breaker, part emcee, part digital-age matchmaker, the online ringmaster steps in when things get awkward, fills the silences, and tries to coax two strangers into something resembling chemistry.

That unusual approach lies at the center of Milian Technology Inc.'s IPO story for investors: the company didn't try to reinvent dating from scratch. Instead, it simply reimagined a new rendition of one of China's oldest professions for an age of livestreaming and mobile payments.

That old-meets-new formula has become serious business for Milian, which refiled for a Hong Kong IPO last week after an earlier application lapsed. The company is pitching investors on something very different from the usual routine of picking out potential mates from a lineup, then engaging in getting-to-know-you chats. Its unusual "third wheel" formula for finding love appears to be rapidly gaining traction. Last year its revenue rose 74% year-on-year to 4.12 billion yuan ($570 million), while its profit more than tripled to 519.1 million yuan, most of that from Yidui. By then, the flagship app accounted for 81.7% of total revenue.

Milian is arriving on a Chinese dating scene that badly needs a fresh story. China's relationship-oriented online social market reached 22.6 billion yuan ($3.1 billion) in 2024 and counted about 280 million users by mid-2025, making it large but hardly easy for companies trying to tap into the market, according to third-party market data in Milian's prospectus.

But that market isn't always necessarily a friendly place for business operators. Hello Group (NASDAQ:MOMO), one of the older names in the space, recently disclosed a 547.9 million yuan ($76.5 million) in potential liability in an ongoing dispute with China's tax authority. Meanwhile, Soulgate Inc., operator of the Soul app, is trying to list in Hong Kong after an earlier attempt in the U.S. failed, aiming to woo investors with an AI-heavy emotional-economy pitch.

What makes Milian stand out is that it's not really a dating app in the Tinder sense at all. The company says its core is a host-led three-party interaction model aimed at users who lack the confidence or social skills to start and maintain conversations online. In other words, it doesn't simply offer instructions to shy people on how to flirt and then leave them to fend for themselves. Rather, it built a paid layer of online matchmakers to grease the dating process and do much of the hardest work. By the end of 2025, Yidui had accumulated more than 193,000 hosts, turning the old Chinese matchmaker into a commission-driven internet role.

The model's cleverness lies in how it monetizes the process. Traditional dating apps tend to make money at the door, through subscriptions or premiums to make yourself more visible. Yidui makes money in the room. In 2025, 98.8% of the company's revenue came from virtual items and interactive functions, while membership services contributed just 1.2%. The company is not really selling access and visibility. It's selling momentum — the small nudges, gifts, and paid interactions that keep a promising romance moving forward.

Monetizing users

That also helps explain why Milian doesn't need Soul- or Hello Group-sized traffic to post eye-catching financials. In 2025, the company averaged 10.3 million monthly active users (MAUs) and 1.2 million monthly paying users, with a paying-user conversion rate of 11.6%. Yidui on its own averaged 4.8 million monthly active users, with a seven-day retention rate of 71.9% and a paying-user conversion rate of 16.4%. That's much smaller than Soulgate's 28 million monthly active users in the first eight months of 2025, but much better monetized than Soulgate's 6.5% paying ratio.

And while Hello Group remains much bigger in terms of its brand recognition, its latest results show a shrinking payer base, with paying users of its core Momo app plunging to 3.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2025 from 5.7 million a year earlier. Yidui may not be the biggest party in town, but it has become unusually good at turning awkwardness, attention, and hope into a growing business.

That formula has been compelling enough to draw in heavyweight backers, including names linked to Xiaomi, Shunwei and Lanchi. Such big names show that serious investors saw more than a quirky social app. They saw a product that found a very specific, very Chinese way to make money by addressing a basic dating problem: too many users want to meet someone, but don't know how to get the conversation started.

Milian does have an AI angle, but it's not the company's main event. Unlike Soulgate, which pitches itself as an AI+ immersive social platform, Milian uses AI more as a support layer — to improve matching, prompts, moderation, and newer overseas products, including apps with AI-powered voice interaction. That makes AI more a practical tool than the central figure in its story. Its core product is still human-facilitated interaction, not AI companionship.

That's also where the story can get messy. The same system that helps awkward users talk more freely can also encourage them to keep spending. Outside the IPO filing, complaint platforms and media reports point to the same tension: some users say they spent heavily on gifts, chats, and other in-app interactions without getting the desired results. More broadly, Chinese court records show that romance scams remain a recurring risk in online dating. Milian acknowledges the same problem, admitting it may not be able to identify every instance of inappropriate content or illegal or fraudulent activity on its service.

But many might argue that's simply the risk anyone takes when dating, be it online or through more traditional offline means like meeting someone at a social event or a bar.

For now, at least, Milian has something many of its peers must envy: a business model that feels culturally intuitive, financially proven, and still unusual enough to stand out. It did not win by building the slickest dating app. It won by recognizing that millions of users don't want to be left alone with a blank chat box and a stranger. They want help, a little theater, a little encouragement, and, above all, someone to help get things started and guide them through the awkward moments of meeting someone new.

Milian turned that need into a company. The real test now is whether public investors will become just as enamored with Milian's story as many of its users who keep coming back for more.

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Benzinga Disclaimer: This article is from an unpaid external contributor. It does not represent Benzinga’s reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.