Mindverse, an AI venture recently funded by Meituan's Strategic Investment Department, has come under fire from a blogger for allegedly inflating data related to its Macaron product.

On June 2, Xinzhou Technology, the parent company of Mindverse, announced that it had secured $50 million in Series A funding from Meituan's Strategic Investment Department, Yuanhe Puhua, and Variable Capital.

In a media interview, Mindverse's founder, Chen Kaijie, claimed that Macaron "currently boasts over 2 million users and more than 100,000 daily active users."

However, these figures were challenged by a video blogger known as "Zangai Xianyu." The blogger suggested in a video that Macaron's purported user base of over 2 million might be inflated through the dissemination of similar online novel videos on TikTok, luring users to Macaron to access the full novels.

(Macaron's short novel videos on TikTok, as depicted in the blogger's video)

Such videos are a common sight for domestic users, representing a popular method of sharing online novel content. On the domestic Douyin platform, there are numerous short videos combining "stress-relieving content with novel plots," some of which direct users to Zhihu Yanxuan novels.

It is worth noting that Zhihu has also initiated a "Promotion Project," collaborating with short video creators on Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, and Video Channels to promote Zhihu's Yanxuan novels through commission-based sharing and attracting users to view the complete stories on the Zhihu platform.

The blogger explained that users can watch short videos featuring voiceovers of online novels on TikTok and, using a provided code (story code), access the full novels for continued reading on the Macaron platform.

Moreover, the blogger uncovered that an AI-generated novel titled "The Impost Sister" is, in fact, identical to a Zhihu Yanxuan novel, merely translated into English.

Xinzhou Technology, the parent company of Mindverse, was established in September 2025 and has been operational for less than a year.

In February 2026, less than six months after its inception, the company secured $20 million in Pre-A round funding from Ant Group and Sequoia China. According to details released by Goldwing Capital, the financial advisor for the transaction, other Pre-A round shareholders include Yuanyi, ZhenFund, and Gaorong Capital.

Mindverse was co-founded by Chen Kaijie and Andrew. In 2018, the duo took a leave of absence from their studies to start a business, worked on robotics, ran a laboratory, and then returned to their respective academic pursuits before reuniting to launch another venture in 2023.

Chen Kaijie, born in 1997, graduated from Duke University with a major in Mechanical Engineering, specializing in Human-Computer Interaction. He has three entrepreneurial ventures under his belt. His first venture was a smart home central control robot, which achieved an annual revenue of 10 million yuan; his second was a "Westworld"-inspired AI game built on GPT; and his third was an interactive story platform called MidReal, which has amassed 3 million overseas users.

Curiously, there is a question on Zhihu concerning allegations of academic credential fraud against Chen Kaijie.

(Discussion on Zhihu regarding allegations of academic credential fraud against Chen Kaijie)

Andrew holds a bachelor's degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and previously served as the Director of the R&D Center at the Shenzhen Tsinghua University Research Institute.

Furthermore, Mindverse's core R&D team comprises approximately 20 individuals from Deepseek, ByteSeed, XAI, and other renowned organizations.

Mindverse offers two main products: Mind Lab, an AI frontier research laboratory, and Macaron AI, touted as the world's first Personal AI terminal product.

(Macaron AI's official website page)

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