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How Akool Grew to $25M in 2025 Selling AI Video Avatars and Face Swaps

Jeff Lu explains how he left Google Cloud, trained task-specific video models, and won enterprise accounts like Coca-Cola.

Jeff Lu · Akool

Published October 6, 2026
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What you’ll learn

Jeff Lu, founder and CEO of Akool, explains how he left Google Cloud in 2022 to build an AI video platform for avatars, face swaps and translation. He walks through the company's revenue by year, the $25M of recognized revenue in 2025 and over $3M in June 2026, and how it won its first customers and enterprise contracts.

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2025 revenue and 2026 outlook

“For 2025, our, recognized revenue is about $25,000,000, and, we are, more than double this year. So we are expecting to get, 60 or something.”
Watch at 04:35

Smaller task-specific video models

“We are not building the largest video foundation models. We are building like video models for specific tasks.”
Watch at 04:02

First customers came from self-serve

“there are lots of users come using it by itself. So we just put a payment gateway on it, and then people begin to pay.”
Watch at 08:28

Coca-Cola benchmarked for months

“they even didn't disclose their identity at the beginning until, like, from the first conversation to get engaged, it's about three months in the middle.”
Watch at 11:56

Largest usage-based contract

“It's it's actually usage based, but they pay us, like, around $4,000,000 a year.”
Watch at 13:55

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About the speaker

Jeff Lu

Founder & CEO · Akool

Company revenue
$25M

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