As the AI industry enters its third year, a collective “model anxiety” begins to spread. News of the impending arrival of GPT-5.3 and DeepSeek V4 dominates headlines, with companies racing to build models with ever-larger parameter counts. Yet in this frenzy of technological competition, one company chose a different path and succeeded. In just two years, SeaArt from Asia has surpassed competitors to become the world’s most-visited AI content creation community. The company achieved this without building any foundational models. Instead, it built an ecosystem.
Key Datas
SeaArt has over 30 million MAU, 50+ million registered users, and an ARR of nearly $50 million. Users spend 3x longer on the platform than competitors, generating over 20 million images and 500,000 videos daily. These engagement datas demonstrate exceptional user stickiness and long-term growth potential.
Its growth is equally impressive. In 2024, SeaArt achieved 7.7x user growth and 5.5x revenue growth. Entering 2025, the platform continues its momentum, with traffic and revenue both growing 4-5x compared to the same period in 2024. Over the past two years, SeaArt has maintained 4-5x annual growth in both user scale and revenue, validating the replicability of its business model and its commercialization potential.
Business Model Innovation: From Efficiency to Emotion
Most AI tools sell efficiency—faster content generation and lower creation barriers. But efficiency tools face an inherent problem: users leave once their tasks are completed. When upstream models gain stronger capabilities, application-layer value can vanish overnight. This is what we call the “efficiency trap.”
SeaArt chose a fundamentally different path. It prioritized emotional value and creative expression over technical specifications. The platform isn’t just about generating content—it’s a comprehensive community where creators connect, share, learn, and monetize their aesthetic visions. This inclusive approach has cultivated a vibrant ecosystem for creative exchange and collaboration.
Decentralized “Taste Marketplace”
SeaArt has built a decentralized PUGC (Professional User-Generated Content) ecosystem—a “taste market” where creators monetize through style and emotion rather than model versions. The platform does not define a “correct style.” Instead, PGC creators use AI to sell their taste, tone, and worldview. Users pay for what’s what is “beautiful, fun, and resonates,” not technical specifications.
This model addresses a persistent issue in generative AI: the unpredictability of random generation. For ordinary users, prompts require skill and experience, but styles that are “beautiful, fun, and resonate” are easy to use. When users invoke a mature “cyberpunk lighting” workflow, they are consuming and reusing hundreds of hours of debugging experience from a seasoned creator. Even in early 2026, many users on SeaArt continue creating content with old models like SD 1.5. They don’t care whether the model version is cutting-edge—they prefer consuming carefully selected styles and emotions in a “taste market” which is directly connected to creators.
The platform has accumulated over 2 million reusable AI creation SKUs (models, LoRAs, workflows, templated applications, digital humans/agents), transforming non-standardized creativity into standardized digital assets. These assets are reusable and personalized, establishing a content and creative supply chain for the AI era. The commoditization of experience significantly reduces the marginal cost of producing high-quality content, enabling everyone can easily create high-quality content.
Gaming Industry DNA: Strategic Advantage
SeaArt’s success stems from the gaming industry DNA of its team. The team’s experience in SLG games and global content operations provides key insights for building high-stickiness communities, understanding user psychology, feedback mechanisms, and addiction curves. This “non-traditional” DNA enables SeaArt to simultaneously manage R&D, long-term operations, and creator ecosystem management, providing significant advantages in cold-start, retention, and ecosystem positive cycle building. The platform’s average user session duration is 3x that of competitors, making SeaArt behave more like a highly engaging online game than a creation tool.
In its global expansion strategy, SeaArt first targets high-demand, low-competition non-English markets, rapidly forming word-of-mouth explosions through the “easy to use” selling point. After establishing scale effects and data flywheels, SeaArt then expands to other markets. Because of gaming industry experience, the team knows how to flexibly schedule cost-effective compute globally. While others struggle with graphics memory, SeaArt has minimized costs through scale effects. Today, massive user scale and daily token volumes have formed compute cost scale effects, establishing a long-term virtuous cycle.
SeaVerse: The AI-Native Revolution
In January, SeaVerse launched. On this platform, all the content is created, consumed, and monetized within an AI-native ecosystem: through multi-agent collaborative delivery, SeaVerse breaks down professional content creation know-how from film, gaming, and music industries into reusable AI workflows. Notably, SeaVerse represents the team’s exploration of transforming from a visually-centric gallery into an all-modal creative consumption content platform for the AI era.
Users don’t need to operate multimodal AI like professional software. Instead, through natural language interaction, they can directly orchestrate different AI tools to create all-modal editable content with both consumption and dissemination capabilities. One creation directly generates spreadable, consumable finished content.
Industry Insights: Ecosystem Over Technology
During the period when the AI industry is transitioning from an explosion in computing power to a boom in applications, SeaArt is validating a new path toward the AI consumption era. As one senior investor noted: “SeaArt succeeds because it doesn’t see itself as an AI company, but as a content community company that understands human nature.”
When the AI hype subsides, the platforms that survive will be those capable of carrying human emotions, fostering social connections, and granting creators dignity. In the future, as AI-native content assets further scale, users will increasingly recognize the value of “platform ecosystems that build strong social relationships through content.” SeaArt has clearly established its leadership in this domain.
