Meitu marks 18 years: Picchi hits $1.11M ARR as AI studios chase product-market fit
In an internal talk at Meitu's 18th anniversary, chairman Wu Xinhong said the company launched 10 AI innovation studios over the past year, with two — Picchi and MVLAND — reaching product-market fit at $1.11M and $680K in ARR respectively as of Oct. 9. He described three product tiers (billion-yuan-scale leaders, million-to-ten-million-yuan potentials, and PMF-stage incubations) and said AI now writes more than 90% of Meitu's code, with over 10 million yuan of compute spent on internal AI productivity in the past year. Meitu's "organizational evolution 2.0," he said, shifts focus from maximizing AI efficiency to sharpening human judgment, after side effects such as bloated AI-written documents.
Another Chinese consumer-imaging company is publicly using ARR to grade its internal AI incubation model, and it offers a candid account of AI-productivity side effects.