The AI studio that turns a thumb-stop on Instagram into a sale - and a photoshoot into a prompt.
Somewhere right now, a shopper taps an ad on Instagram. The screen slides, the scroll keeps its rhythm, the photography looks like it cost a fortune to shoot. It didn't. They are no longer on Instagram - they are on a brand's own page, built in real time for them, and they have no idea they crossed a border. That border is exactly what ChatLabs was built to erase.
For a decade, brands poured money into social ads that performed beautifully right up until the click. Then the shopper landed on a website that felt like a different century - slow, generic, impersonal. Attention earned in a feed evaporated at the front door of the store.
ChatLabs was created to solve that single, stubborn problem: how do you make a digital experience as engaging and personal as social media without a brand losing control of its identity? It is a question luxury houses obsess over, because for them control of identity is the product.
The answer was a Social eXperiences Platform. It reads the signals - what ad you tapped, what you browse, how you behave - and uses generative AI to assemble a page that feels native to the feed you just left. The transition is so smooth most shoppers never notice it happened.
That instinct - meet people where their attention already lives - is not academic for this team. CEO Jenkin Richard had already built a social commerce company, Chatly, and sold it to Salesforce. ChatLabs is the second act, with sharper tools.
ChatLabs started where social commerce breaks and has since walked upstream into the creative itself. Today a brand can use it to do two things that used to require very different budgets.
Carry a shopper from a Facebook or Instagram ad into a hyper-personalized, native-feeling page hosted on the brand's own subdomain. Dynamic content and calls-to-action are assembled per person, in real time.
Upload a product once and generate studio-quality photography, lifestyle scenes, performance ads and ecommerce assets - no physical studio, no models, no reshoots. Campaign-ready in minutes.
Set your fonts, colors and tone once. Every asset the engine produces stays on-brand across social, web and campaigns, so scale never costs you consistency.
Who is it for? Consumer, retail and luxury brands - fashion, beauty, electronics, home, wellness, food and beverage. The pitch is the same whether you sell handbags or beer: keep the polish, lose the production line.
"A 134% increase in conversion rate from social media and a significant uplift in ROAS." - Hannah Goldie, MX Marketing Manager.
"Virtually indistinguishable from a professional location shoot," with dramatically reduced agency and production costs. - Johnny Johnson, CEO & Co-Founder.
And then there is the validation that matters most in this corner of the market: LVMH. In 2023, ChatLabs won the Data & AI Award at the LVMH Innovation Awards at Viva Technology in Paris, earning a seat in La Maison des Startups, the group's accelerator at Station F. Brands across the LVMH Group, including Dior and Tiffany, are among its users.
Founded social commerce firm Chatly, acquired by Salesforce. MIT Sloan MBA. Based near Washington, in McLean, Virginia.
London-based former De Beers executive who carries the luxury-industry lens. The public voice behind the 2023 LVMH AI award win.
China-based engineering leader responsible for turning the platform's ambitions into shipped technology.
It is a deliberately stretched team - McLean to London to China - the kind of distribution that only makes sense if your customers live everywhere and your accelerator happens to be in Paris.
Wins at the LVMH Innovation Awards during VivaTech and joins La Maison des Startups at Station F.
Closes seed funding led by Silicon Road Ventures, with Pier 88 Ventures, Mu Ventures and strategic angels.
Repositions publicly as an AI product photography and brand creative studio (chatlabs.studio), expanding from experiences into the creative itself.
A retail-and-commerce-leaning syndicate for a retail-and-commerce-leaning bet. The thesis is simple: the gap between social attention and the sale is enormous, and whoever closes it cleanly gets paid.
Sources include ChatLabs press releases, citybiz, Pier 88 Ventures and the LVMH Innovation Awards. Funding figures reflect the December 2024 seed round.