Short videos are in high demand. On major platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok, users watch billions of videos every day, with companies massively benefiting from this content explosion. For creators, this often means there’s pressure to create more content than ever to be relevant and make a living from it, especially as more and more artificial intelligence trickery infiltrates these platforms.
Jay Neo, creator and former head of content for short videos at MrBeast, believes that AI can help creators understand what works for them and also help them generate new content ideas along those lines. That’s why, along with former Palantir engineer Shivam Kumar and creator Harry Jones, they’re building a platform called A fight to help creators.
Neo joined MrBeast at 18 to work on viewer retention. In a chat with TechCrunch, he said he set out to study different metrics to understand where video viewing declined.
“I was so obsessed with retention charts and figuring out why viewers stayed or why they left. I had a document where I wrote all of that down. Gradually, my role shifted to taking more responsibility around editing and ideation,” Neo said.
Neo’s Crowning Jewel was a video where the creator asks people on the street if they would fly to Paris to get a baguettewhich garnered more than 1.8 billion views across all channels. MrBeast ended up making several videos in this format.
In 2023, Neo left MrBeast and started several channels under the name ‘Creaky’ with another co-writer of MrBeast and reduced them to over a billion views per month.
With these experiences, Neo understood that there is power in content formulation and analysis. During the creation of Creaky, the team had several spreadsheets that tracked different metrics around videos. At the time, one of Neo’s advisors suggested he turn these ideas into a product for creators, and he began working with Palo’s other co-founders in early 2024.
Palo has three main parts to its app: an AI-powered ideation and design tool, analytics, and community. The company integrates a creator and asks them to integrate all their accounts. The tool then analyzes all their short videos and provides insights into what works and what doesn’t.
Kumar, who is CTO at the startup, said Palo uses a mixture of models to extract a tree of data that has information about hooks, audience sentiment, topics of interest, originality and potentially relevant search terms.
“The inference engine takes these main data points and then uses a cocktail of leading LLMs to hierarchically aggregate these data points into a cache for hot memory, embeddings that can later be semantically retrieved, and various other forms of structured data,” Kumar said. “All of this together helps us build a persona for the creator that is true to them and fully aware of their taste and style.”
The AI designer has a chat interface, like any other chatbot, and creators can ask general questions about their content. Additionally, they can ask the tool to generate a script based on a formula. If one is a more visual creator with less speech in their clips, the tool can also create a storyboard with different hooks.
Right now, the community section is nascent and allows creators to message each other.
In its test phase, the company partnered with around 40 creators with more than 1 million users across all channels. Today, the company is opening up its tool to creators with 100,000 followers at a starting price of $250 per month to use the tool, with more expensive tiers available for higher usage rates.
The company has raised $3.8 million in funding from Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India) Surge, with participation from NFX and individual investors.
Peak XV CEO Rajan Anandan said the company was introduced to Palo’s team by one of Neo’s mentors. He said the team’s experience as part of successful creative teams and technical understanding prompted the company to invest in the startup.
“Creators everywhere are looking for tools that make the process smoother without taking away their voice. Jay and the team had extraordinary clarity about where the real value was and where it wasn’t, which gave us strong conviction. AI is enabling a new class of identity-aware systems that learn deeply from the world’s best creators,” he told TechCrunch.
Josh Constine, a former TechCrunch editor and Palo investor, said the tool can help creators keep up with heavy content demands.
“I’ve experienced creator burnout myself, which is why I invested in Palo. The challenge today is that to keep up with the latest viral hooks and strategies to beat the algorithm, you have to spend hours a day consuming content, which I think rewires your brain to default to consuming instead of creating something new. That can lead to procrastination.
The release of Palo comes at a time when there is palpable tension between artificial intelligence and the creator community. Platforms like TikTok, Meta, and Google have added more AI-powered tools for creators. While creators have started using AI tools, people like MrBeast have spoken out about the negative impact it could have on the industry.
A key challenge in building AI tools for creators is getting them into a standard habit of creating similar content. Neo said that Palo, the tool, is trying to push creators in a direction where they can be successful, and admitted that good videos will still come from the creators’ emotions.
“Here’s an analogy… when a comedian is trying out new material on stage, they’re both consciously and subconsciously collecting data on whether or not the audience was entertained. Each show is a repeat, and each new audience benefits from what the comedian learned from the show before. We think AI can give creators a similar advantage,” Neo said.
Sam Beres, a creator also known as Sambucha, said AI companies working on creator tools should always involve creators from conception to better understand their pain points.
“Many times, AI tools present a wealth of irrelevant information and ironically hinder creators because they will develop shiny object syndrome and aimlessly use emerging AI without actually improving their videos. That’s why I always advise emerging AI companies to work with creators at launch/conception not only for marketing efforts, but also to help and help with implementation.
