Jingwei and Fengrui invested in an intelligent musical instrument company targeting the mass music market, with annual revenue of hundreds of millions | Hard Tech Exclusive

How did Niu Yafeng’s entrepreneurial journey start from campus?

Author | Huang Nan

Editor | Yuan Silai

Hardcore has learned exclusively that the smart instrument brand AeroBand has recently completed nearly 100 million yuan in Series A financing, led by Matrix Partners, with participation from Oasis Capital, Guotai Junan, and existing shareholder Fengrui Capital. AeroBand is part of Shenzhen Dailuo Motion Technology Company, and the financing funds will be primarily invested in new product development, accelerating global market expansion, and building a core talent team to attract top R&D, product, and marketing talent with an international perspective.

AeroBand has long focused on the development of digital electronic musical instruments and the global expansion of smart instruments. With motion interaction technology at its core, it has completed product iterations from air picks, motion-sensing drum kits PocketDrum, to the smart guitar AeroBand Guitar, lowering the entry barrier for music learning to achieve digital performance and creative expression with smart instruments.

Founder and CEO Niu Yafeng comes from an engineering background. In 2015, Niu Yafeng and his college classmates formed a team to participate in an entrepreneurial competition, choosing a relatively niche direction in musical instruments at the time due to a simple reason: traditional guitar learning has a high barrier, and beginners often take months to play a complete song. They wanted to explore the possibility of “reconstructing the instrument experience with technology.”

The team focused on motion interaction and created a pair of smart gloves: wearing them allows users to simulate guitar and bass playing in the air, and swinging their arms can strike drum beats, giving rise to the name AeroBand (Air Band).

With this idea, they won the championship of that year’s entrepreneurial competition, and Niu Yafeng officially registered the company in 2016, starting his entrepreneurial journey. In the following three years, based on the gloves, they continuously iterated on them, spending time refining gesture recognition algorithms and adjusting integrated acoustic designs, evolving the glove prototype into a more portable air pick, launching AeroBand’s first official product.

According to research reports from Statista and others, the global musical instrument market exceeds 40 billion dollars, with the guitar category projected to grow to 12 billion dollars by 2025. However, the musical instrument market has not undergone fundamental changes in over a century. Although materials, sensors, and electronic signal technologies have developed well, the musical instrument industry remains in the “electronic” stage, far from achieving true digitization.

The iterations of AeroBand’s products reflect the exploration path of digital instruments to some extent. In 2018, AeroBand’s air pick was launched, a motion-sensing device the size of a guitar pick that contains an accelerometer and gyroscope, allowing users to play chords with their left hand in conjunction with a mobile app. This product garnered over a thousand orders on JD crowdfunding, also validating the market’s demand for new types of smart instruments for the first time.

Its second product is a motion-sensing drum kit, which expanded from one inertial sensor to four, allowing users to strike with drumsticks to achieve the effect of a nine-piece drum kit, with over 5,000 orders sold in a single month. This also made Niu Yafeng realize the high acceptance and strong purchasing power of innovative categories in overseas markets.

At that time, social media platforms represented by TikTok were rising overseas. AeroBand seized the opportunity to drive traffic to its independent site through original short videos that highlighted selling points, endorsements from KOLs, and other methods, successfully establishing the conversion chain from content touchpoints to brand engagement. Niu Yafeng pointed out that the overseas launch of smart hardware products needs to start from the user perspective, “Let users first understand ‘who we are?’ In what scenarios can they see me? Recognize me, trust me, and finally, where to purchase.” By 2022, AeroBand’s annual revenue had reached tens of millions of yuan.

AeroBand Guitar (Image source/Company)

AeroBand’s third-generation product is a fully digital smart guitar.

Smart instrument products present flexible usage scenarios in different markets. Domestically, users emphasize quick access to playing and singing as well as social sharing; while overseas users, with a richer musical cultural background, place more importance on creative assistance and multi-tone linkage for deeper expression.

AeroBand Guitar targets two distinctly different user groups. One group consists of creators who have a strong need for creative expression but are constrained by cumbersome traditional equipment; switching tones requires effects pedals, and composing requires learning keyboards, while recording a melody necessitates repeated audio adjustments. The other group is the general public who enjoy music but are deterred by the months of practice required.

Previous electronic musical products like electric guitars amplified analog signals but essentially remained physical sound generators. The solution adopted by AeroBand Guitar is to digitize everything from the string, pickup sensors, to the synthesizer and acoustic components.

When users play, the algorithm records sound signals in real-time as editable MIDI data rather than simply audio waveforms. Modifying a melody can be done by directly dragging the track, and switching tones no longer requires an effects pedal matrix; one AeroBand Guitar can output a variety of tones including acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, and piano.

AeroBand Guitar offers self-learning course services (Image source/Company)

For creators, this means that a guitar serves more like a music creation platform, allowing guitarists to compose directly without needing to learn keyboards, with recorded content adjustable at any time, thus improving music creation efficiency.

For the general public, AeroBand Guitar aligns its hardware performance with professional instruments, its sound library using professional synthesizer-level samples, and the touch feedback and vibration sensation have been calibrated to closely resemble the playing feel of real instruments.

At the same time, the interaction method greatly lowers the learning barrier for users. For songs that users enjoy, the app provides automatically generated compatible courses; during the learning process, the algorithm can real-time recognize users’ chord pressing accuracy and rhythm deviations, providing precise feedback and subsequent learning suggestions.

From 3 minutes of easy play and sing, to advanced practice, to performance recording and social sharing, AeroBand Guitar connects the entire “play-learn-practice-show” chain.

A content platform for non-professional users interested in musical instruments (Image source/Company)

“Don’t get hung up on whether it’s an instrument or a toy,” Niu Yafeng emphasizes. “If we define it for just 5% of professionals, we will overlook the 95% of people who want to start their musical passion but are blocked by barriers. Our focus is to allow more people to easily access music; hardware expressiveness should be professional, but interaction must be friendly.”

Behind this path is the AeroBand team’s reflection on the underlying logic of the musical instrument industry and the reconfiguration of the interaction model between people and music.

In Niu Yafeng’s view, the ultimate form of smart musical instruments is not a tool, but a solution for emotional value. “Users can pick it up to play their favorite songs when they are happy, and they can also create content that represents their current emotions. Through hardware devices, app algorithm services, and content communities, it fundamentally changes the complex chain of expensive traditional instruments and music store training.”

Hardcore has learned that by 2024, AeroBand’s total sales across all product lines will reach over 100 million yuan, with 2025 expected to achieve a doubling growth in revenue. Currently, the second-generation AeroBand Guitar is under development, which will incorporate AI-assisted creation, further lowering the barriers to creation; the product is planned to launch in late 2026.

From a campus entrepreneurship to a revenue scale of hundreds of millions, evolving from a pair of gloves into a complete smart product matrix, a Chinese hardware company has spent nearly a decade trying to prove that in the musical instrument market dominated by traditional giants, the breakthrough point for startups does not lie in direct confrontation but in using intelligence to create an opening, precisely tapping into the incremental market of “allowing more people to play music.”