Short videos are in high demand. Across large platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, users watch billions of videos every day, and businesses are benefiting tremendously from this content explosion. For creators, this often means there’s pressure to create more content than ever in order to stay relevant and make a living from it, especially as AI-generated slop permeates these platforms.
Jay Neo, short video creator and former content lead at MrBeast, believes AI can also help creators understand what works for them and generate new content ideas in that direction. That’s why they, along with former Palantir engineer Shivam Kumar and creator Harry Jones, are building a platform called Palo to empower creators.
Neo joined MrBeast at the age of 18 to work on audience retention. In a conversation with TechCrunch, he said he has become obsessed with studying various metrics to understand where video viewership drops.
“I was really into retention graphs and understanding why viewers stay and why viewers leave. I had a document with all this written down. Gradually, my role shifted to taking more responsibility in terms of editing and ideation,” Neo said.
Neo’s best work is a video in which the creator asks passersby if they can fly to Paris to buy baguettes, which has garnered more than 1.8 billion views across his channels. MrBeast ended up creating multiple videos in this format.
In 2023, Neo left MrBeast and started several channels under the “Creaky” brand with another MrBeast co-writer, which they scaled to over 1 billion monthly views.
From these experiences, Neo understood the power in content creation and analysis. While building Creaky, the team used multiple spreadsheets to track various metrics about video. At the time, one of Neo’s advisors suggested turning these insights into a product for creators, and he began working with Palo’s other co-founders in early 2024.
Palo’s app has three main parts: AI-powered ideation and planning tools, analytics, and community. The company onboards creators and asks them to merge all their accounts. The tool then analyzes all your short videos and provides insight into what’s working and what’s not.
Kumar, the company’s CTO, said Palo uses a variety of models to extract data trees containing insights about hooks, audience sentiment, topics of interest, originality, and potentially relevant search terms.
“The inference engine takes these key data points and uses a cocktail of top LLMs to hierarchically aggregate these data points into caches for hot memory, embeddings that can be retrieved later semantically, and various other structured data formats,” Kumar said. “All of this combined allows us to build a creator persona that is true to the creator and fully aware of their tastes and style.”
Like other chatbots, AI Planner has a conversational interface that allows authors to ask general questions about the content. Additionally, you can also ask the tool to create a script based on your formulas. For more visual creators with less audio in their clips, the tool can also create storyboards with different hooks.
The community portion is currently in its early stages and will allow creators to send messages to each other.
The company worked with about 40 creators with more than 1 million users across their channels during the testing phase. Currently, the company is opening up the tool to creators with 100,000 followers at a starting price of $250 per month, with more expensive tiers available for higher usage.
The company has raised $3.8 million in funding from Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India) Surge with participation from NFX and private investors.
Peak XV managing director Rajan Anandan said the company was introduced to Paro’s team by one of Neo’s mentors. He said the team’s experience and technical understanding as part of successful creative teams propelled the company towards investing in startups.
“Creators around the world are looking for tools to make the process smoother without taking away their voice. Jay and the team were unusually clear about where the real value was and where there wasn’t. That gave us a lot of confidence. AI is enabling a new category of identity-aware systems that learn deeply from the world’s best creators,” he told TechCrunch.
Josh Constine, former TechCrunch editor and Paro investor, said the tool will help creators keep up with the high demand for content.
“I’ve experienced burnout as a creator myself, which is why I invested in Paro. Today’s challenge is to spend hours each day consuming brain-rotting content in order to keep up with the latest viral hooks and strategies to beat the algorithms. I think this rewires your brain to consume instead of creating something new, which can lead to procrastination, writer’s block, and burnout,” Constine said.
Palo’s launch comes at a time of clear tension between AI and the creator community. Platforms like TikTok, Meta, and Google are adding more AI-powered tools for creators. While creators are starting to use AI tools, people like MrBeast are talking about the negative impact they can have on the industry.
The main challenge in creating AI tools for creators is that they fall into the routine of creating similar content. Neo said the tool Palo is trying to steer creators toward success, and acknowledged that good videos still come from the creator’s intuition.
“Take this analogy: When comedians try new material on stage, they are consciously or unconsciously collecting data about whether the audience found it funny or not. Each performance becomes an iteration, and new audiences benefit from what comedians have learned from previous shows. We believe AI can provide similar benefits for creators,” Neo said.
Creator Sam Beres, also known as Sambucha, said AI companies working on creator tools should always engage creators from the ideation stage to better understand their pain points.
“Oftentimes, AI tools present a ton of irrelevant information, which ironically gets in the way of creators, because creators fall into shiny object syndrome and use emerging AI in a directionless manner without actually enhancing their videos. That’s why I always advise emerging AI companies to partner with creators at launch/conception to help not only with their marketing efforts, but more importantly, build their product as needed,” he said.
