Short videos are in high demand. Across major platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok, users watch billions of videos every day, with businesses benefiting greatly from this content explosion. For creators, this often means there is pressure to create more content than ever before in order to be relevant and make a living, especially as more AI-generated slop infiltrates these platforms.
Jay Neo, a creator and former content manager for short videos at MrBeast, believes that AI can help creators understand what works for them and also help them create 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 Palo to help creators.
Neo joined MrBeast at 18 to work on viewer retention. Speaking to TechCrunch, he said he became obsessed with studying different metrics to understand where video viewership was falling.
“I was so obsessed with retention graphs and finding out why viewers stayed or why they left. I had a document where I wrote all of this down. Gradually my role shifted to having more responsibility around editing and ideation,” Neo said.
Neo’s crown jewel was a video in which the creator asks people on the street if they would fly to Paris for a baguette, which garnered more than 1.8 billion views across channels. MrBeast ended up making several videos with this format.
In 2023, Neo left MrBeast and started several channels under the “Creaky” branding with another MrBeast co-writer, scaling these to over a billion views per month.
With these experiences, Neo understood that there is power in content formulation and analysis. During his time building Creaky, the team had several spreadsheets that tracked various metrics around videos. At the time, one of Neo’s advisors suggested he turn this insight into a product for creators, and he began working with Palo’s other co-founders in early 2024.
Palo has three core parts to its app: an AI-powered ideation and planning tool, analytics and community. The company onboards 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 the startup’s CTO, said Palo uses a mix of models to extract a data tree that has insights into hooks, audience sentiment, topics of interest, originality and possible related search terms.
“The inference engine, which takes these primary data points and then uses a cocktail of top LLMs to hierarchically aggregate these data points into cache for hot memory, embeddings that can be retrieved later semantically, and various other structured data formats,” Kumar said. “All of these together help us build a persona for the creator that is true to them and fully aware of their taste and style.”
The AI ​​scheduler has a conversational interface like any other chatbot, and creators can ask general questions about their content. Plus, they can ask the tool to create a script based on a formula. If someone 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 part is nascent and allows creators to message each other.
In its testing phase, the company worked with about 40 creators with more than 1 million users across channels. Today, the company is opening its tool to creators with 100,000 followers with 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’s (formerly Sequoia India) Surge, with participation from NFX and individual investors.
Peak XV’s CEO, Rajan Anandan, said the company was introduced to Palo’s team by one of Neo’s mentors. He said the team’s experience of being part of successful creative teams and technical understanding led the firm to invest in the startup.
“Creators everywhere are looking for tools that make their process smoother without taking away their voice. Jay and the team had exceptional clarity about where the real value lies and where it doesn’t, which gave us strong conviction. AI is enabling a new category of identity-aware systems that learn deeply from the world’s best creators,” he told TechCrunch.
Josh Constine, a former TechCrunch editor and investor in Palo, said the tool can help creators keep up with big content demands.
“I’ve experienced burnout myself as a creator, and that’s 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 brain rotting, consuming content that I think rewires your brain to default to consumption instead of creating something new. That can lead to writer burnout,” Burnout said, and burnout.
Palo’s launch comes at a time when there is noticeable tension between AI 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 core challenge in creating AI tools for creators is getting them to fall into a formal 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 out of creators’ gut feelings.
“Here’s an analogy… when a comedian tries out some new material on stage, they’re both consciously and unconsciously gathering data about whether the audience was entertained or not. Each performance becomes an iteration, and each new audience benefits from what the comedian learned from the show before. We believe AI can provide creators with a similar benefit,” Neo said.