He builds the narrow, stubborn strip of internet between a scroll and a sale.
Somewhere between the moment a person taps an ad on their phone and the moment they hand over a credit card, most brands lose them. Jenkin Richard has spent two companies, one acquisition, and the better part of a career staring at that gap. ChatLabs, the startup he now leads as co-founder and CEO, exists to close it.
ChatLabs is an AI platform that takes the traffic pouring off social media - the tap on a Reel, the swipe past a story, the click on a paid post - and turns it into a shopping experience that feels less like landing on a corporate homepage and more like the feed the visitor just left. The pitch is deceptively simple: make the brand's own digital surface as alive, as personal, and as immediate as social media, without the brand losing control of how it looks or what it says.
That last clause is the hard part, and it is the reason luxury houses picked up the phone. ChatLabs was incubated inside LVMH's innovation accelerator - not a garage, not a generic startup program, but the machinery of the world's largest luxury group. From that vantage the company's early customer list reads like a boutique row: LVMH houses including Dior and Tiffany, plus Kering, Richemont, and, on the consumer-electronics side, Samsung. When you sell to brands whose entire value is the precision of their image, "the AI might go off-message" is not an acceptable footnote. ChatLabs' answer is a system that locks fonts, colors, and tone in place while it generates on-brand product images, ads, and campaign visuals - no photoshoot, no careful prompt-engineering required.
In December 2024 the company closed a $3.2 million seed round led by Silicon Road Ventures, a fund built around retail and commerce. The round is small by the standards of the AI hype cycle, and that is rather the point. Richard is not selling a demo. He is selling a number: Samsung, ChatLabs says, saw a 134% increase in conversions from social media. In a category drowning in "revolutionary" claims, a conversion figure is the kind of thing a CFO can actually hold.
The company is headquartered on 7th Avenue in Manhattan, though its people are scattered by design. Richard runs it from the United States. His co-founder Michel Tjoeng operates out of London. Gray Guo leads technical delivery from China. It is a founding team stretched across three continents and, not coincidentally, across three of the markets that matter most to global brands.
Look closely and both of his companies are the same company, built twice, a little sharper each time.
Before ChatLabs there was Chatly. Richard founded it and ran it as CTO - a builder first, an executive second - and the firm worked the same seam: social commerce, the awkward handshake between how people spend their attention and how brands want them to spend their money. Chatly was acquired by Salesforce, the outcome most founders describe in a single line on a slide and spend years actually earning.
What is telling is that he did not wander off to a different problem afterward. Plenty of second-time founders treat their first exit as permission to chase something entirely new. Richard went back to the same wall and hit it again, this time with generative AI in hand and a luxury conglomerate as his first believer. The bounce rate - that quiet, unglamorous metric measuring how many visitors leave without doing anything - is arguably the through-line of his whole career.
His training explains some of the doubling-down. An undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley gave him the engineer's instinct to build the thing rather than describe it. An MBA from MIT's Sloan School gave him the operator's language to sell it to a boardroom. Founders usually lean hard toward one pole or the other. Richard sits between them, which is a useful place to sit when your customers are creative directors on one side and revenue officers on the other.
Brands feed in their assets - logos, palettes, product shots, the raw ingredients of an identity. The system reads the brand, not just the files.
Pick a template, and the platform produces unlimited on-brand variations: product images, ads, campaign visuals. No studio, no photographer, no prompt gymnastics.
The output lands as personalized social-native journeys tuned to each visitor - built to raise conversion and starve the bounce rate.
The customers ChatLabs won are the customers with the most to lose.
Dior does not want its handbags rendered by an algorithm that occasionally hallucinates a fifth strap. Tiffany's blue is a legal asset. When ChatLabs generates content, the constraint is not "be creative" - it is "never break character." That inversion, treating brand consistency as the feature rather than the limitation, is what let a young startup sit at the table with houses that turn away most technology vendors on principle.
The proof point that travels best is not from luxury at all. It is Samsung, and it is a number: a reported 134% lift in conversions from social media. Different industry, same physics. Whether you are selling a phone or a fragrance, the visitor who arrives from a feed expects the destination to feel like the feed. ChatLabs' bet is that most brands still fail that expectation, and that closing the gap is worth real money.
Two social commerce startups, same obsession - his first, Chatly, was bought by Salesforce.
ChatLabs makes campaign-ready product imagery without a studio or a single carefully-worded prompt.
The startup's earliest validation came from inside LVMH, not from a Sand Hill Road accelerator.
A Berkeley engineering background stapled to an MIT Sloan MBA - he can write the code and pitch the board.