Short videos are in high demand. Across large platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, users are watching billions of videos every day, with companies benefitting massively from this content explosion. For creators, this often means there is pressure to create more content than ever before to be relevant and make a living out of it, especially as more AI-generated slop is infiltrating these platforms.
Jay Neo, a creator and former content lead for short videos at MrBeast, thinks AI can help creators understand what is working for them and also help them create new content ideas in that direction. That’s why, along with former Palantir engineer Shivam Kumar and creator Harry Jones, they are building a platform called Palo to aid creators.
Neo joined MrBeast at 18 to work on viewer retention. In a conversation with TechCrunch, he said that he became fixated with studying different metrics to understand where video viewership dipped.
“I was so obsessed with retention graphs and figuring out why viewers stayed or why they left. I had a document where I noted all this down. Gradually, my role shifted to getting 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’d fly to Paris to get a baguette, which garnered more than 1.8 billion views across channels. MrBeast ended up making multiple videos with this format.
In 2023, Neo left MrBeast and started several channels under the “Creaky” branding with another MrBeast co-writer and scaled these to over a billion views per month.
With these experiences, Neo understood there’s power in content formulation and analytics. During his time building Creaky, the team had multiple spreadsheets tracking different metrics around videos. At that time, one of Neo’s advisors suggested that he turn these insights into a product for creators, and he started 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 is working and what is not.
Kumar, who is CTO at the startup, said that Palo uses a mix of models to extract a data tree that has insights into hooks, audience sentiment, interest topics, 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 which can later be semantically retrieved, and various other structured data formats,” Kumar said. “All of these together help us build a persona for the creator, which is true to them and fully aware of their taste and style.”
The AI planner 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 test phase, the company worked with around 40 creators with more than 1 million users across channels. Today, the company is opening up its tool to creators with 100,000 followers with a starting price of $250 a month to use the tool, with costlier 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 managing director, Rajan Anandan, said the firm was introduced to Palo’s team by one of Neo’s mentors. He said the team’s experience in being part of successful creative teams and technical understanding edged the firm towards investing in the startup.
“Creators everywhere are looking for tools that make their process smoother without taking away their voice. Jay and the team had unusual clarity about where the real value lies and where it does not, 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 that the tool can help creators keep up with heavy content demands.
“I’ve experienced burnout as a creator 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 per day getting brain-rotted, consuming content, which I think rewires your brain to default to consumption instead of making something new. That can lead to procrastination, writer’s block, and burnout,” Constine said.
Palo’s launch comes at a time when there is palpable 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, folks like MrBeast have spoken about the negative impact it could have on the industry.
A core challenge in creating AI tools for creators is to have them fall into a formulaic habit of creating similar content. Neo said that Palo, the tool, tries to nudge creators in a direction where they might 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 the stage, they’re both consciously and subconsciously gathering data on whether the audience was amused 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 give creators a similar advantage,” Neo said.
