WAIC 2026 Shanghai: AI in Four Niche Verticals (July 2026)

Takeaway: research-search tools are a mature overseas category with million-visit months — Consensus alone tops 5M — though June dipped 12–26% MoM, consistent with end-of-semester seasonality. The two domestic exhibitors, Codar (an “AI research buddy”) and JMuse, have no precise public traffic record yet and sit at a much earlier stage. Consumer willingness to pay is proven overseas; the domestic market is still wide open.

Takeaway: this is the only track where domestic products already show up on the global traffic chart. Trooly hit 148.8K visits in June — ahead of Strella and Voicepanel, one order of magnitude behind leader Listen Labs — and its +287.8% MoM was the fastest growth in our entire sample. Capital agrees: Trooly and Mizzen each closed ~$10M rounds in 2026 from investors including BlueRun, Hillhouse, Sequoia Seed and Fortune Capital. High-quality user input is being priced as a new data asset.
Funding info compiled from public reports

Takeaway: legal AI is B2B everywhere. Harvey charges law firms per seat; its 1.13M monthly visits reflect brand momentum more than user scale. On growth, plaintiff-firm AI Eve (+20.5%) and research assistant Paxton (+10.2%) rose fastest, and Europe’s Legora kept growing. The four domestic exhibitors all converge on case-file management + drafting + on-prem deployment, where website traffic was never the right yardstick. One signal worth noting: JurisAI closed a GSR-led Pre-A in April 2026 — the market is paying for legal workflows, not legal Q&A.
Funding info compiled from public reports

Takeaway: this is the biggest global market of the four. Gamma clears 24M monthly visits; the three AI meeting-notes products (Otter / Fathom / Fireflies) sum past 16M; enterprise-search Glean holds 3.45M and keeps growing. Almost no domestic exhibitor attacks these self-serve global products head-on. Instead they build digital employees wired into OA/ERP (Laplace), a company knowledge brain (Nama), document extraction (SoMark) — project-delivered businesses inside enterprise workflows, invisible on traffic charts but a more realistic path in China’s enterprise-software market. The exception is MaidangShow AiPPT, a Gamma look-alike worth watching for a self-serve growth curve.