New Firm Backs Short-Form Video Creators with AI Tools

In California, a former content lead for YouTube no.1 MrBeast and an engineer from data company Palantir are among the founders of Palo, a new platform helping short-form video content creators maximise their potential through real-time analytics, content research and pattern-spotting.

Around two years in the making, the company is based in and named after the town of Palo Alto, and says its mission is 'to help creators wield AI to beat AI.' Co-founder Jay Neo joined MrBeast when he was eighteen, to work on viewer retention, and told online publication TechCrunch he 'became fixated with studying different metrics to understand where video viewership dipped.' He has now teamed up with former Palantir engineer Shivam Kumar and creator Harry Jones to launch Palo, which works for creators with a minimum of 100,000 followers, analyzing their content archive and getting to know their style, assessing what does and doesn't work, and 'mixes in the latest strategies to help them make better content faster.' It also helps with background research to speed and improve their storytelling.

Kumar, who is Palo's CTO, told TechCrunch the company uses 'a cocktail of top LLMs... to extract a data tree that has insights into hooks, audience sentiment, interest topics, originality, and possible related search terms.' This helps it to build a persona for the creator, which is 'true to them and fully aware of their taste and style.' However, in contrast to the formulaic and potentially repetitive content often generated by AI tools working alone, Palo tries - in Neo's words - to nudge creators in a direction where they might be successful, testing new ideas and iterating.

The company has raised $3.8 million in funding, to date, and is online at www.palo.ai .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.