Early-stage Project | Chance AI Secures Millions of US Dollars in Investment from Meitu and Others, with User Count Reaching 200,000

Author: Ou Xue

Editor: Yuan Silai

Yingke learned that Chance AI, a startup in the field of Visual Agent (visual intelligent agent), announced the completion of a seed - round financing of millions of US dollars. This round was led by Meitu, with follow - on investments from NYX Ventures, Alibaba - affiliated investment institutions, etc. The financing will be used for model capability iteration, growth in the North American student population, and exploration of community and commercialization.

Chance AI was founded in 2025. Its core product is the world's first AI product with the camera as the main interaction entry - Visual Agent (visual intelligent agent).

Different from traditional AI products that rely on input boxes, when users open Chance AI, they can directly take pictures of the content in front of them, and the system can understand the visual intention and provide judgments, suggestions, and action plans.

An overview of the Chance AI APP interface (Source: the company)

The founder of the company, Zeng Xi, has experiences spanning academia and industry. He obtained a doctorate from the University of Barcelona, with a research focus on cognitive science and contemporary art. Later, he was in charge of product and design at OnePlus and OPPO. Then he joined ByteDance and participated in the 0 - to - 1 exploration of AI products such as Doubao in the Flow department.

This "academia + hardware + software" experience made him realize that large language models are good at "answering questions", but AI still provides very limited support for human visual - based judgments.

Technically, Chance AI's Visual Agent ranked first in the world in the multi - modal reasoning benchmark MMMU - Pro evaluation with an accuracy rate of 86.07%, surpassing the human baseline (85.4%).

Its product logic is "see - understand intention - call Agent - complete action", rather than the traditional "take a photo - recognize - return results". As users use it more, the system will form the user's personal visual memory, including style preferences, wardrobe composition, social image, etc.

Zeng Xi said, "Chance AI doesn't just understand pictures. It understands why users take the picture, what problems they want to solve, and what the next action is."

As of now, Chance AI has accumulated about 200,000 users, about 40% of whom are from the North American market. The product covers more than 35 countries. The 30 - day return rate reaches 49.2%, and user stickiness significantly leads the industry. The product has reached the top of Product Hunt twice.

Chance AI initially targeted young women in North America, especially college girls. This group is called "Visual Native", who grew up in the culture of Instagram, TikTok, and selfies, and naturally prioritize visual understanding and expression. Currently, the core usage scenarios are concentrated in aesthetic accumulation, personal image analysis, outfit checks, design judgment, and social expression.

The company's early growth was centered around North American universities. It has established networks in universities such as New York University and the University of Southern California, obtained seed users through offline activities, and collected real - demand feedback. According to the company's disclosure, nearly half of the users will use the product again within a month after installation.

Chance AI's promotional activities in North American universities (Source: the company)

In terms of business models, the company has planned three directions: subscription for premium features, hardware authorization, and cautious advertising recommendations. However, the top priority at present is to cultivate user habits.

In the long run, the company plans to evolve from a Visual Agent tool to an AI - native lifestyle community - after users take pictures, the Agent generates shareable content, and users interact with each other around style, aesthetics, and lifestyle.

In 2026, the company's most important goal is to continue to expand deeply among the North American student population and explore the real usage scenarios of young people.

Views from investors:

The global investment head of Meitu said: "We believe that the next stage of AI consumer applications is to more naturally enter users' daily decision - making and expression processes. We see that Chance AI has taken visual AI from image recognition to aesthetic taste. This is also the reason for our investment - they have productized complex AI capabilities and brought them into the aesthetic lives of young users around the world."