Yinchao’s millions: AI music that lets anyone be a composer

Jiang Tao

Jiang Tao did not set out to build a music AI company. He set out to give his wife a gift. That detour, a decade in the making, has produced one of China’s most talked-about AI music platforms and a quietly ambitious global expansion play.

There is a moment in most founder origin stories where the mission and the person become indistinguishable. For Tao, founder of Shanghai and Beijing-based AI startup Initiai.on, that moment happened not in a boardroom or an accelerator cohort, but in a recording session with his daughter.

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“I decided to train a model to generate a song for my wife as a gift,” Tao told e27 on the sidelines of BEYOND Expo 2026. “I used three years to train models that could generate melody and lyrics. And then my daughter and I sang the song together — the melody, the lyrics, all generated by the model.”

He pauses before adding, almost as a footnote: “I had never studied music before.”

What he did have was twenty years of machine learning experience, rooted in a PhD focused on speaker recognition, the science of identifying who someone is from their voice. That technical foundation, combined with a personal obsession he freely admits started as a romantic gesture, became the thesis behind Initiai.on: that AI could unlock musical self-expression for people who had never had access to it before.

From Tencent Music to founding his own model

Tao spent part of his pre-startup career at Tencent Music, one of the largest music streaming and entertainment platforms in the world, where he was part of an internal team exploring music generation. It was also around that time that he watched a pivotal case study unfold in the global AI music space.

“Have you heard of Suno, the most popular music generation company?” he asks. “At first, they did not want to generate music; they wanted to train a speech generation model. They uploaded a model named Bark to GitHub. People found that Bark could generate songs with vocals and background music. From that point, Suno turned to generate songs, not speech.”

The accidental discovery that audiences wanted AI-generated music, not just AI-generated speech, was a signal Tao took seriously. Combined with his own years of research and his Tencent experience, it gave him the conviction to go foundational: to build Initiai.on’s models from scratch rather than layer applications on top of existing APIs.

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“At that point, I knew I must do this full time,” he says. “It was so exciting.”

Yinchao: millions of users, and a grandfather singing to his grandchildren

Initiai.on’s flagship consumer product, Yinchao — a one-stop AI music creation and consumption platform built on the company’s self-developed large model — has crossed a user base in the millions. The platform also generated the official theme song for the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), a signal of both the model’s technical maturity and its growing institutional credibility.

But the users Tao describes with the most evident pride are not the engineers or the institutional clients; they are the everyday people who had never thought of themselves as musicians.

“Even people without music knowledge can use this model to generate a song, to record their story,” he explains. “You record 30 seconds in our app, and we can embed your voice, and use that to generate the sounds. And many people on our app generate songs for their fathers, mothers, grandparents, grandchildren.” He smiles. “I like every day to read their stories, listen to their stories through their songs.”

The platform also serves professional musicians at the other end of the spectrum — artists with a hundred musical ideas and the budget to properly produce only a handful. Yinchao lets them generate full demos rapidly, stress-testing concepts before committing to full production.

On the devaluation question

The obvious provocation in any interview about AI music is the question of whether the technology devalues human creativity, commoditising the most intimate form of human expression. Tao does not dodge it, but he reframes it in a way that reflects both his engineering background and what sounds like genuine conviction.

“In China, people always pay for their emotions,” he says. “Some people don’t care whether the music was generated by a human or by technology. All they care is whether this music makes them happy? Does it make me want to cry? Does it satisfy my emotions?”

His second argument is economic access. Before tools like Yinchao, commissioning a custom song as a personal gift could cost upwards of US$2,000. “Only a few people could do this. Now everyone can.” He is not dismissive of human artistry, though. “I think genuine creative people can think of patterns that a model cannot generate. That is the most valuable thing in humanity.”

Going global, starting this week

For most of its existence, Initiai.on has operated primarily in the Chinese market. That is changing. At BEYOND Expo, Tao confirmed the company is launching a new product called Hitok, aimed at international markets including Australia, India, and Europe.

The monetisation model will differ by region. In Western markets, the platform operates on a credit-based system for generating music and music videos. In China, users pay for other formats of engagement and content. The model already supports multiple languages — Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean — with more in the pipeline.