Mind Lab
Category: AI Agents
Mind Lab is the frontier AI research arm of Macaron AI (Mindverse/心洲科技), focused on Experiential Intelligence — building AI agents that learn and improve through real-world reinforcement learning using LoRA-based post-training. Mind Lab was founded in 2025. The company is led by Kaijie Chen (陈锴杰). Based in Beijing, China. Team size: 11-50. Total funding raised: $50M. Latest round: Series A. Key investors include Ant Group, Meituan, Hongshan (Sequoia China), ZhenFund, Linear Capital, Gaorong Capital, Yuan One Capital, Yuanhe Puhua, Shaoyin Technology, Variable Capital.
- Founded
- 2025
- Headquarters
- Beijing, China
- Team size
- 11-50
- Total funding
- $50M
Value proposition
Mind Lab enables AI agents to learn continually from real-world experience through LoRA-based reinforcement learning at 10% of typical GPU cost, powering Macaron AI's Personal Agent that creates personalized mini-apps for everyday life.
Products and solutions
Macaron-V1 (748B Venti & 50B Tall agent models, first post-trained on GLM-5.2), MinT (Mind Lab Toolkit - RL infrastructure for trillion-parameter LLMs), Macaron AI (Personal Agent app - creates personalized mini-apps for daily life), LongStraw (long-context RL post-training up to 2M tokens), Mixture-of-LoRA (MoL) architecture, UI4A (Generative UI solution), Macaron ChatBench & LivingBench (Personal Intelligence benchmarks)
Unique value
First team globally to run high-performance RL on trillion-parameter open-source models using LoRA at 10% GPU cost; Mixture-of-LoRA architecture enabling "one model per person" personalization; Research-product co-design loop between Mind Lab and Macaron AI app.
Target customer
Individual consumers seeking personalized AI life assistants (B2C via Macaron AI app); Enterprise/developer teams needing customized agent models via LoRA post-training (B2B via MinT platform)
Industries served
Personal AI Assistants, Consumer Lifestyle, Generative UI, AI Agent Infrastructure
How they differentiate
Unlike competitors focused on pre-training scale or productivity tools, Mind Lab/Macaron AI focuses on post-training via RL + LoRA for personalization. They pioneered trillion-parameter LoRA RL (only 3 teams globally: Mind Lab, Thinking Machines Lab, Fireworks). Their models are purpose-built for personal/lifestyle agent tasks rather than general-purpose benchmarks. They achieve SOTA on Personal Intelligence benchmarks (LivingBench, VitaBench, A2UI, PinchBench) while being open and self-hostable.
Main competitors
Thinking Machines Lab (Mira Murati's startup, same LoRA RL approach), Lovable (AI app builder), Cursor (AI coding), Anthropic's Claude (general agent capabilities), ByteDance (VolcEngine/VERL)
Key partnerships
NVIDIA (techniques merged into NeMo Megatron-Bridge), ByteDance (techniques merged into VolcEngine RL / VERL), Zhipu AI (GLM-5.2 as base model for Macaron-V1-Venti), Qwen (Qwen 3.6 as base model for Macaron-V1-Tall)
Notable customers
200万+ users (2M+ users) on Macaron AI app, 100K+ DAU, 300K+ user-created mini-apps on platform
Major milestones
Dec 2025: Mind Lab officially launched, First trillion-parameter LoRA RL achieved at 10% GPU cost, Techniques merged into NVIDIA Megatron & ByteDance VERL, Aug 2025: Macaron AI product launched, Jan 2026: $20M+ Pre-Series A led by Ant Group, Jun 2026: $30M Series A led by Meituan ($50M total), Jul 2026: Macaron-V1 released (748B/50B), first model post-trained on GLM-5.2
Growth metrics
200万+ users; 100K+ DAU; 300K+ user-created apps; App generation time reduced from 20 min to 10 seconds; 99.9% success rate
Market positioning
Pioneer in "Personal Intelligence" — differentiated from productivity AI by focusing on lifestyle/personal use cases. Positioned as a research-first company (Mind Lab) that feeds into a consumer product (Macaron AI), similar to how DeepMind feeds into Google or Anthropic's research feeds Claude. Backed by top-tier Chinese investors (Ant Group, Meituan, Sequoia China).
Geographic focus
China (primary); Singapore (HQ for Macaron AI); Global (open-source model releases on HuggingFace)
Patents and IP
Mixture-of-LoRA (MoL) architecture; LongStraw long-context RL training infrastructure; MinT RL platform; Macaron ChatBench & LivingBench evaluation frameworks; UI4A Generative UI system
About Kaijie Chen (陈锴杰)
Ex-MidReal (AI storytelling platform, 2M+ users) Founder; Ex-Yunzhongzi Technology (AI gamified social) Founder; Duke University Mechanical Engineering (HCI), GPA 3.99; Gold Medal Yau Science Awards Physics 2013; Intern at Zhihu under CTO Li Shenshen
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Official website: https://macaron.im/mindlab