The Punky team members first met at the SparkLab hackathon, coming ​from various places—Chiang Mai, Beijing, Hangzhou, and Chengdu. ​We all shared a desire to create something meaningful, which brought ​us together in Shanghai’s SparkLab. After days of brainstorming, ​endless product documentation, relentless design prototyping, and ​hundreds of GitHub commits, we finally built our demo—a small ​chatbot dog. But we felt this could be more than just a demo; we ​wanted to develop it into a full-fledged product for the market. And so, ​Punky was born.

The journey with Punky has been far from easy: team members joining ​and leaving, code breaking just before hackathon submissions, and ​investors backing out at the last minute. Thankfully, we overcame ​these challenges, evolving from a local file to an app nearing its alpha ​test phase. We’ve gone from self-funding AI training to receiving ​backing from major IPs and financial support from various sources. ​The hard work has truly paid off.

As the product designer of the team, I created every pitch deck, ​designed product prototypes, and worked on the UI design. The initial ​prototype was revised multiple times until we finally arrived at a ​satisfying design. I crafted hundreds of unique features and thousands ​of combinations, making Punky a project I’m deeply attached to. As a ​member of P-Lab, we’ll continue developing our product in line with ​our vision statement: “AI Companion not as a service but as a being.”

Our project is still rapidly iterating, and in a few months, our product ​might look entirely different from what it is now. The following ​product descriptions are based on October 2024, so stay tuned!