"Dealism" Closes Angel Round of Over 100 Million Yuan Led by Hillhouse, with HSG and Linear Capital Participating | Linear Portfolio

AI Agent startup Dealism recently announced a $15 million angel round led by Hillhouse, with HSG, Linear Capital, and other investors participating.**

As the world's first Vibe Selling AI product, Dealism is building highly personalized intelligent avatars for every salesperson, designed specifically for overseas markets. It goes beyond chatbots — it's a sales partner that can truly "read people."

Its founder, Leo Huanfang, formerly COO and co-president of Youzan Technology, spent years managing large-scale sales organizations and repeatedly led teams through 0-to-1 innovation and scalable growth. His frontline experience taught him that sales has never been about processes or scripts — it's about insight into and empathy for people. Now, he's extending that philosophy through Dealism: using AI to transform human warmth and perceptiveness into sustainable, replicable intelligent sales power.

Dealism, an AI Agent company founded by former Hillhouse investor and former Youzan COO Leo Huanfang, has completed a $15 million angel round led by Hillhouse, with HSG and Linear Capital participating. Beyond institutional investors, the round included the founder's own capital and several individual investors.

Leo's career began at Hillhouse. From 2011 to 2018, he served as VP there, investing in companies including Youzan, Zoom, and NIO. In 2018, he joined Youzan as co-president and COO, spending seven years overseeing commercialization, sales systems, and growth strategy. Now he's chosen to start again, with the goal of "using AI to replace the repetitive, inefficient communication tasks that dominate sales roles."

Dealism was formally established this July. Its core product is a conversational sales Agent built around the "Vibe Selling Agent" concept — an AI sales partner that anyone can pick up and use, one that reads customer psychology, picks up on emotional signals, and moves deals toward close. Targeting Latin American and North American markets, its customers include independent creators, local service providers, e-commerce sellers, and other SMBs. The team currently numbers fewer than 20 people, headquartered in Singapore with plans for global expansion.

On the eve of the product's official launch, An Yong Waves sat down with Leo. He explained why he's all in on "vertical Agents" and why he believes this year represents the best timing for Agent entrepreneurship. "Because the best time to plant a tree is today." Below is the conversation between An Yong and Leo:

An Yong: How does a "Vibe Selling Agent" differ from intelligent customer service?

Leo: We're not building traditional chatbots. Chatbot is an extremely broad concept — in fact, there's no actual job called "chatting" in this world. What we're really building is object-based, purpose-driven conversational Agents. It understands who you are and what you're trying to accomplish, then autonomously communicates with external customers to achieve that goal.

Think of it as a personalized conversational Agent for every individual. It can learn from your materials, your communication style, your sales process. And this Agent has continuous learning and memory capabilities — it gets to know you better over time, and keeps improving on emotional intelligence, customer psychology, negotiation, and other more "human-like" dimensions.

An Yong: So you're essentially giving every salesperson an "AI doppelgänger"?

Leo: You could put it that way. I also hope to make it easy for ordinary people — including individual entrepreneurs and side-hustlers — to pick up and use a sales Agent to achieve their goals.

An Yong: So your target customers are overseas "Xianyu sellers"?

Leo: Our primary markets are North America and Latin America. Broadly speaking, anyone in a sales role or function with market-facing needs could become our user. The tier skews toward prosumers and SMBs — Chinese brands going global, cross-border merchants, that sort of profile.

An Yong: Why do they all need a personal sales Agent?

Leo: They're the classic "high customer service pressure, low professionalism" group. Compared to China, their overall degree of "online-ization" is much lower, though the shift is happening fast — and labor is expensive. Chinese e-commerce demands 30-second response times, but if you're running an overseas independent site, having someone respond within 24 hours would be impressive, let alone for creators with large followings. So against this backdrop of massive communication demand, where they can't afford professional operations teams and don't have existing CRM systems, Agents can directly fill this gap.

An Yong: How is Dealism thinking about monetization currently?

Leo: Right now it's per-user subscription plus session volume. We'll transition to outcome-based pricing in the future.

An Yong: How long until "deliverables can be measured by outcomes"?

Leo: Once what I deliver can be measured by outcomes, the latter becomes possible. Of course it depends on scenario complexity. I see that in certain specific industries and scenarios, we're already very close to direct transaction closure. I'm quite optimistic on the progress here.

An Yong: You were once an investor yourself — "endgame" is a question this crowd loves to ask. What's Dealism's endgame?

Leo: In an era of rapid large model iteration, forget endgame — judgments beyond six months carry real risk. But we can look at some relatively certain factors. First, the ceiling here is very high: 150 million sales professionals globally, with $3-5 trillion in annual labor market expenditure. If Agents can replace even a portion of that, it's already a massive market. So this isn't traditional SaaS — it's a new kind of "personal productivity tool." What we're doing now is providing frontline productivity, which doesn't overlap with traditional SaaS in this domain. I believe Sales Agent will become the sales production and management tool of the new era.

We want every sales individual globally to have an Agent, becoming super-individuals of the new era. This will happen over the next decade, and we hope to be among the earliest to make it happen.

An Yong: When did you decide to go all in on the Agent direction?

Leo: I started following large model technology and transformation in 2022. My first core judgment then was: vertical AI Agents will become the new productivity form of the future.

We've all lived through the mobile internet era. That wave of technology enabled all workflows to be recorded, digitized, and thus more standardized (SOP-ified). But it didn't fundamentally change the workflows themselves — it just gave existing processes stronger scale effects, which is why we saw companies with massive organizational scale globally.

But this time, the intelligence and reasoning capability that AI brings is an element never before seen in humanity's thousands of years of tool use. It will cause roles and workflows across industries to experience "first deconstruction, then reconstruction." The ultimate change is that organizational scale and human resource needs will drop dramatically — possibly even below pre-internet levels — while team productivity rises significantly. The gap between these two is filled by more efficient, more intelligent Agents. I believe this is an inevitable trend over the next decade.

I believe the next generation of advanced organizations will be extremely small in scale, no longer needing HR to assist in managing large organizations, but instead needing AR (Agent resource) — people who introduce, deploy, and manage Agents for teams.

An Yong: Why do you believe you're the one who can do this?

Leo: I often tell the team that among all teams building AI, we're probably the ones who understand consumer businesses best. Over the past seven or eight years, while managing listed company Youzan, I served hundreds of thousands of Chinese and overseas consumer-facing brands, covering virtually every industry and category, facilitating over 100 billion RMB in GMV annually. China is the market with the richest supply globally, which has also given rise to the most advanced sales models. We've done extensive research and knowledge extraction, which is the competitiveness of Chinese brands going global — and it's why I want to use Agents to package China's leading sales productivity and take it global.

An Yong: Did pain points from your Youzan days catalyze your entrepreneurship?

Leo: Part of my core work was managing a market and sales team of several thousand people, with an annual budget exceeding $100 million. In fact, 60% went to frontline team recruitment, training, and coaching enablement. I hired one excellent colleague after another, who achieved great results through their own diligence and effort. But many of them left because they couldn't sustain the repetitive customer development work. The next generation of AI Sales Agents can take over this repetitive communication, freeing people to spend time on truly valuable customer connection and trust-building.

An Yong: From the current perspective, what's the biggest challenge in making this happen?

Leo: Conversational sales is a decentralized knowledge accumulation — every industry's vertical scenario has specific practices and personalized best practices. Building entirely new product interaction patterns that let users give feedback during use, accumulating experiential data, and letting your Agent continuously learn to become more like you is crucial. At the same time, the product's ability to accumulate user context and buyer behavior across the full transaction chain is also critical. Buying and selling is a closed-loop behavior with very strong outcome signals, naturally suited for reinforcement learning training, and will ultimately self-reinforce to become more outcome-oriented.

An Yong: Agent entrepreneurship is hot this year, and very crowded. What do you think it takes to win?

Leo: Agents can do many things. If we're talking purely about productivity scenarios, I think deep industry knowledge + building next-generation product interaction patterns + moving fast are most important.

An Yong: What do you think Hillhouse, HSG, and Linear's investors are primarily betting on with Dealism in this round?

Leo: You'd have to ask the investors themselves, though I'm deeply grateful for their trust. I believe vertical Agents as a new productivity form is a large enough opportunity, and that my team and I have accumulated sufficient depth on this, with the experience and strong knowledge to bring the latest technology to broad users through product. Of course on the team front, we'd love to bring on more partners with local market expansion and user growth experience in Latin America and North America.

An Yong: Is 2025 the best vintage year for Agent entrepreneurship?

Leo: I think there are two most important things about entrepreneurship: first, timing, and second, don't think too small — the latter is harder. I believe Agent substitution of productivity is a ten-year cycle, ten-trillion-dollar opportunity, so it's hard for me to say whether 2025 is the best year. But it's never too late to act now.

An Yong: The first year of the next ten years is the best year?

Leo: Of course.