QuestMobile report: AI investment and financing will increase by 20.8% year-on-year in the second half of 2025, with plugins accounting for 81.5% of 205 new AI applications.

PANews reported on December 23 that, according to QuestMobile's "AI Application Interaction Innovation and Ecosystem Implementation Report for the Second Half of 2025," the AI application field showed a trend of multimodal technological breakthroughs and accelerated ecosystem development in the second half of the year. The report indicated that the top three AI-native apps in terms of active users were Doubao (155 million), DeepSeek (81.56 million), and Yuanbao (20.84 million). Newcomers like Ant Financial's Afu and Lingguang also performed well, ranking fourth and tenth respectively on the weekly active user list.

The capital market was also active. From July to November, the AI industry completed 186 investment and financing events, totaling 33.67 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 20.8%. Multimodal interaction has become the mainstream in the industry, accounting for 73.3%, while full-modal large-scale models, although accounting for only 1.9%, are regarded as a key direction for the future.

At the application level, among the 205 new AI applications, plugins accounted for 81.5%, with strong demand in vertical sectors such as AI image processing and AI professional consulting. Leading companies are actively promoting ecosystem development; for example, Tencent has achieved full-scenario matrix coverage through "Yuanbao," and Ant Group's Lingguang App has achieved a 7-fold increase in daily active users, demonstrating strong performance.

Furthermore, mobile phone manufacturers are driving a shift in interaction from "App-driven" to "intelligent agent-driven" through "screen-viewing + screen-tapping" GUI intelligent agent technology, further improving user experience and task completion efficiency. The report believes that multimodal and ecosystem-based approaches will become the core drivers of future AI application growth.