Hemi App: A Digital Community for Gen Z’s Career and Social Development

Established in October 2021, a Chinese app called Hemi is positioned as a career and social development community targeted at Gen Z college students. This year, it received angel investment reaching several million yuan from venture capital institutions in Silicon Valley and entrepreneurs in China, including Chengtan Network, ClassIn co-founder Gu Yan, Amino Capital and Ondine Capital. The startup is currently seeking a new round of financing.

“The meaning of Hemi [called 半区 in Chinese, meaning ‘half-zone’] is the half-zone that belongs to young people’s online life, in addition to their offline life,” CFO Olivia Han said. The Hemi app started with small-scale in-house alpha testing in May 2022, and will be officially launched this month. It labels communities through interests, so that young people with similar hobbies or career plans can transcend their original social circles and have more opportunities to communicate and share.

When registering for Hemi, users choose different tags such as interests, occupation and school to generate a more personalized profile, and the system will recommend corresponding communities and friends. They can then express their opinions in community discussions and add friends.

In addition to online communication, Hemi also aims to promote offline activities, such as travel, frisbee activities, outdoor adventures, mock cases and interviews, also organizing for users in a common industry to have dinner together.

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Hemi is mainly starting its promotion in colleges and with key opinion leaders. In top universities, it is attempting to expand its influence by cooperating with various associations and students. Job-seeking and intern bloggers with influence on popular Chinese platforms such as Xiaohongshu and WeChat are being invited to create and operate communities in the Hemi app.