Xiaohongshu

Xiaohongshu (小红书, internationally known as RedNote) is a Chinese social and e-commerce platform founded in 2013 in Shanghai by Charlwin Mao and Miranda Qu. It combines user-generated content ("notes" — text, images, short videos) with e-commerce and social commerce features, focused on lifestyle, fashion and cosmetics product recommendations (so-called zhongcao / 种草, literally "grass planting" — recommending products). The legal operating entity is Xingyin Information Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. In 2024 the company reached a ~$17B valuation, with over 300M monthly active users and quarterly sales exceeding $1B. Investors include Alibaba, Tencent, HongShan (formerly Sequoia China), DST Global, Hillhouse and CITIC Capital. In January 2025 the platform saw an influx of new U.S. users amid the looming TikTok ban. The company's AI lab operates as rednote-hilab and publishes open multimodal models (including the DeepEyes series).