OpenAI, Investors Eye Agent Startups Led by Chinese Founders

Chinese tech founders with strong pedigrees are starting to attract attention in Silicon Valley, including from OpenAI, for launching artificial intelligence agents targeting the U.S. market. 

They’re following in the footsteps of Manus, a browser-using agent developed by Chinese founders that briefly went viral earlier this year and got financial backing from Benchmark.

With names like Genspark, Lovart, Flowith and Fellou, agents developed by Chinese founders aim to automate all kinds of tasks, such as handling analytical research and turning the findings into spreadsheets and presentation slides; or managing schedules, making appointments and planning trips. They are powered by AI models and tools from Anthropic, OpenAI and other providers.

Some focus on creative projects that require expertise in art direction and design. (If you’re awash in marketing for agent startups and products the way we are, please see this helpful table that Aaron just published about seven types of AI agents.)

Lovart, which handles design-related tasks, can help an aspiring cafe owner to come up with a branding concept as well as the shop’s logo, interior design, merchandise packages and marketing content like images and videos, for instance.

“We have a chance to run a global product,” said Lovart founder Melvin Chen, a former executive at ByteDance who helped turn the Chinese tech firm’s video-editing app, CapCut, into a global hit. 

An invitation-only beta version of Lovart, released in May, attracted more than 100,000 signups during the first five days, according to Chen. His team, based in California and China, is now preparing for the full release of Lovart later this month. It plans to throw a launch party in San Francisco with Ideo, the U.S. design firm behind Apple’s first mouse.

Genspark, founded by former executives of Chinese search giant Baidu, released a general-purpose AI agent called Super Agent in April and has since added many new functions to it. For example, the agent analyzes raw data, academic papers and websites to create presentations that also embed relevant videos gathered from YouTube. 

Genspark also says it can make phone calls on behalf of customers to make restaurant reservations and dentist appointments or, in at least one case, to help someone resign from their employer.

Genspark has said it reached $36 million in annual recurring revenue within 45 days of launching Super Agent, which costs $25 per month or $250 per year, implying it has at least 144,000 paying customers. The two-year-old company has raised $160 million in funding, according to the Generative AI Database.

Last week, OpenAI published a blog post about Genspark, noting that it uses the U.S. company’s GPT-4.1 and real-time voice models. 

“Generative AI is shifting from frontier science to engineering execution—China’s sweet spot,” said Murong Yang, managing director of China-based Future Capital Discovery Fund, which has invested in Lovart and other Chinese-origin firms developing AI-powered products outside China.

Washington’s wariness towards Chinese companies operating in the U.S. could be a problem for the startups. Their founders are trying to avoid the scrutiny that TikTok, Shein and Temu have faced in the U.S. and other countries over national security concerns.

To minimize such risks, the startups are setting up shop in the U.S. or Singapore. 

The leadership team of Manus, including its three cofounders, relocated to Singapore from China in May, for instance. The startup now describes itself as a Singapore-headquartered company. Manus has also opened offices in California and Tokyo. 

Lovart is a San Francisco-based company, and Flowith and Fellou also say they are U.S. startups based in California, according to their websites and social media profiles.

Genspark is based in Singapore and Palo Alto, Calif., and the startup doesn’t have any team or business in China, according to an employee. It has 24 employees.

Here’s what else is going on…

Zuckerberg’s Latest Haul

Ruoming Pang, who led Apple’s efforts to develop AI foundation models, is departing the company to join Meta’s new AI organization, where he will receive a compensation package worth tens of millions of dollars per year, Bloomberg reported. (That’s a lot of money, but it’s not on the high end of offers Meta is making to other researchers!) 

Meta is also hiring researchers Yuanzhi Li from OpenAI and Anton Bakhtin from Anthropic, according to the report.

These hires are the latest results of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s mad scramble to upgrade his AI team, including hiring nine researchers from OpenAI and effectively paying billions of dollars for several other senior managers.

Deals and Debuts

See The Information’s Generative AI Database for an exclusive list of private companies and their investors.

AI cloud company CoreWeave agreed to buy Core Scientific in an all-stock deal worth about $9 billion, in a push to expand its artificial intelligence data center capacity.

Robotera, which develops AI-powered humanoid robots, raised $69 million in a Series A funding round led by CDH Investments and Haier Capital, with participation from Houxue Capital, Meridian Capital, Xianghe Capital, Fengli Smart, Crystal Stream and Tsinghua Holdings Capital, Tech in Asia reported.

Filics, which designs flat rolling robots to move pallets in warehouses, raised $15.9 million from investors including The Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, F-LOG Ventures, Sandwater, Alven, Bayern Kapital, Capnamic and 10x Founders.

Synfini, which develops AI for drug discovery, raised $8.9 million in funding led by JSL Health, with participation from SRI Ventures, WERU Investments, Ferocity Capital, High Water Venture Partners, Foothill Ventures, Trust Ventures, Gaingels and Mana Ventures.

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