Collov Labs today announced its new research lab dedicated to developing visual intelligence systems that turn images and camera input into real-world actions through agentic AI. The company is founde...
Autore: Business Wire
Lab founded by researchers from Stanford, Berkeley, and Yale announces $23M Series A backed by Brightway Future Capital, Taihill Venture, Mindworks Capital, Matrix Partners MPCi to accelerate development of visual AI systems and applications for AI devices.
SAN FRANCISCO: Collov Labs today announced its new research lab dedicated to developing visual intelligence systems that turn images and camera input into real-world actions through agentic AI. The company is founded on the belief that the next major breakthrough in AI will come from systems that can understand and reason about the visual and physical world. This interface shift will unlock AI adoption for billions more people.
Collov’s founding team has deep expertise developing multimodal AI and has built systems that have shaped how billions of people discover, experience, and interact with content online. While pursuing his PhD in applied physics at Stanford, Collov’s CEO and co-founder Xiao Zhang explored AI models, spatial relationships, and complex physical systems. CTO and co-founder Casey Zhou worked on generative AI systems at TikTok and contributed to multimodal model development at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab. Rex Ying, Chief Scientist, is a Yale University professor and lead author of PinSage, the graph neural network deployed at Pinterest that became the foundational reference for large-scale recommendation AI. These academic and work experiences were critical in informing the beliefs on which Collov is based; that the next stage of AI capability and adoption requires the technology to interpret what people see.
“The next interface for AI won’t be text or chat-based. It will be the camera,” said Xiao Zhang, CEO and co-founder of Collov Labs. “A picture is worth a thousand words, and this applies to AI too. Our goal is to make it possible for someone to point their camera at something and have AI understand the scene, reason about it, and help them act on it.”
To enable this new interface, Collov Labs is developing visual intelligence systems that combine diffusion models, spatial reasoning, and multi-step agentic workflows within a simple visual interface, and it already operates a portfolio of AI applications that brings this technology to more than 1 million users and professionals across more than 300 companies. Its existing products, Collov AI and CozyAI, help users design environments and automate tasks that typically require manual creative workflows. These applications also serve as a learning loop for the system, feeding real usage data back into the company’s models and improving their ability to understand scenes and produce consistent results.
“When personal computers were controlled only through text commands, they were difficult for most people to use. The graphical interface changed that by making computers intuitive for everyone,” said Casey Zhou, CTO and co-founder of Collov Labs. “Visual interfaces will do the same for AI, allowing far more people to use it naturally and unlocking AI for billions of people who have never considered using the technology.”
Despite rapid breakthroughs in AI, most of the world has yet to use it and consumer adoption is rare outside of chatbots. Eighty-four percent of people globally, approximately 6.8 billion people, have never used AI, and only 16 percent have tried tools like a free chatbot, according to a report from the Microsoft AI Economy Institute.
“Visual AI will power the next generation of intelligent products and devices,” said Echo Cheng, General Partner at Brightway Future Capital. “Collov’s work in visual intelligence and agentic systems positions the company to help define how AI interacts with the physical world.”
Toward the Next Generation of Visual AI
As AI wearables and hardware advances toward immersive environments, video, and real-time interaction, technologies that combine spatial reasoning, generative models, and agentic systems will become foundational infrastructure.
Collov’s visual intelligence model has contributed to a 20x increase in revenue due to its ability to generate highly specific, accurate images, and was the first consumer application to be directly integrated into Qualcomm's on-device system, allowing users to access Collov apps directly.
Collov Labs plans to use its new funding to expand its research team and accelerate development of visual AI applications with more advanced agentic capabilities capable of executing complex tasks and supporting more use cases.
About Collov Labs
Collov Labs is an AI research and product company building the intelligence layer for visual AI. Founded in 2021, headquartered in Silicon Valley and backed by Matrix Partners MPCi, the company develops visual intelligence systems. These systems combine diffusion models, spatial reasoning, and agentic workflows - enabling AI to understand scenes, reason about visual context, and translate images or camera input into real-world actions. Its visual intelligence model was one of the first consumer applications to be directly integrated into Qualcomm's on-device system, and is featured in the Qualcomm® Hexagon™ NPU. Its two flagship products, Collov AI and CozyAI, serve as real-world environments for testing and sharpening its systems. To date, Collov Labs has grown to over 1 million users, 10,000+ paid customers, and 300+ enterprise collaborators across retail, design, and e-commerce. It has a full stack of shipped visual AI capabilities spanning style generation, scene understanding, and spatial reasoning tools that turn images and camera input into personalized, actionable experiences at scale.
Fonte: Business Wire