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

I left Google Cloud in 2022. I have been working on the generative AI for images and videos. I decided to full time create a job at Google and start a company.

So how many videos are you... Are your users altogether free and paid creating per day on Akool today? About 500,000, I would say, per day. Images, videos, and all the assets.

For 2025, our, recognized revenue is about $25,000,000, and, we are, more than double this year.

Hey, folks. My guest today is Jeff Lu. He's the Founder and CEO of Akool, a generative AI video platform for avatars, video translation, and real time video. He's an AI and computer vision veteran with over ten years of experience in this space, having previously worked at Microsoft, Apple, specifically on face ID, and Google Cloud. Jeff, you ready to take us to the top?

Yeah. Thank you for inviting me here today.

You bet. Okay. What year did you leave Google Cloud or Apple to launch Akool?

So I left Google Cloud in 2022 to launch Akool. So it's kind of at the beginning of this generative AI wave. And what were you

seeing at Google Cloud at the time that sort of gave you the idea for this? What was the initial product you launched?

I have been working on the generative AI for images and videos for a pretty long time. And what we see is that their technology is becoming mature. At that time, Google is pretty conservative on generative AI, especially on videos and so on. They think they cannot control the results, and they want everything to be 100% under control. So I decided to full time quit a job at

Google and start a company. But before, I was kind of part time, worked a little bit, and it's during the COVID and so on. Yeah.

There's so many people building AI tools. They say it's the best. I asked you ahead of time. Prepare a screen so you can share and show us the product. Show us what you're building.

So the thing that we initially get popular is the swap features. So we have a whole swap series. You can swap the face, swap the character in the video, swap the motions, swap the head, and then swap the hair, and so on. Then we get our avatar features, very popular, especially around the... On the b to b side, our most popular feature is actually avatars. And you can create static

avatars, and you can create live interaction avatars, you can create your own version of the avatars, and so on. This is the most popular feature on the B2B side. The foundation models, which we do some fine tunes, are also very popular. And more recently, we launched something called agentic canvas, and it's a new feature, and I think it's also getting popular.

Basically, can use AI agents to help you to create a long format of the videos, And you can just type and it will create the video by itself.

My question is a lot of people are gonna go, Jeff's not doing anything special. There's a bunch of tools I can use to do a face swap. But you've actually... You're not just using other foundation models, you're actually fine tuning. Now you're a technologist. Explain to the marketer watching this why that's valuable to them, why your fine tuning adds value to their life.

Yeah. Yeah. For the swap series of the models, we're actually not just fine tuning. We are designing the model from scratch and doing the models ourselves. So it's a pretty different model architecture and tuning that size and so on. So the result quality and how it handles the corner cases and the boundary cases are very different.

Can you just educate us? When you say you're building your own foundation models, most people think you have to have billions of dollars to do that. How are you doing it?

We are not building the largest video foundation models. We are building like video models for specific tasks. So for example, the avatar, you generate humans in the video. Human generation for only that task, and then the model is much smaller. And also we create a swap series. You make changes to humans in the videos. And the video models are much smaller than the large foundation models that generate everything. So that's how we control the cost and control the budget and make things move.

You've been pretty transparent about your revenue growth. Are you comfortable assuring what revenue is today?

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. Yeah.

So you anticipate finishing in December 2026 with about 60,000,000 of ARR?

On revenue, not ARR.

Tell me how you measure.

Yeah. So revenue, you recognize the revenues and add, the trailing twelve monthlies. So that's, how it works. And the ARR, you probably use the, last month's, multiply 12, that's, revenue run rate. So it's a different, way of measuring it. So... Yeah.

Jeff, I love that about you. Right? That's the quickest way to tell if I'm interviewing a marketing founder or a technical founder. All the marketing founders take last month's revenue, multiply by 12. You're conservative. You're looking back, which I think is awesome. What does that mean in terms of we're recording this in July? If we just look at last month's revenue, how much did you do just last month?

Last month's revenue, I think it's over $3,000,000.

That's incredible. How... What was that like? I mean, did you ever expect when you launched this thing thing three, four years ago, you'd be doing $3,000,000 a month?

It's actually pretty different when we just got started. We're trying to focus on b to b purely, and we can now get into mix of b to b and b to c and and so on. But our goal is still to bring this to a very big company. So, I think we are still on the way, going there.

What does your actual tech stack look like? I mean, you have a bunch of Mac studios running in a closet or h 200 somewhere? Are you renting from one of the inference providers? Like, how do you do your training?

We rent servers from their, cloud providers, and then we do training on these servers. We use multiple ones, but Lambda is used a lot, and there's some others, and we all depend on the workload and the needs and so on.

Since you're a user of those platforms, I'm trying to figure out who's going to win that space. Who do you think is going to win that space?

I think on the infrastructure side, there will be multiple winners. It's very hard for a company to dominate, So that's how the B2B side works. And if you are doing B2C, then probably there will be a bigger player.

Yeah. Other folks listening right now are trying to, like, build their own version of sort of foundation models. And I think that my audience generally, they know what a prompt in clot is, right, or. And then they say, well, I want my prompt out of memory. So then they upload a bunch of MD files, but then they hit context window issues and hallucinations in clot and. So then they say, maybe I should host my own files,

do my own training, and then it gets really complex really, really quickly. You've obviously pushed that pretty far the other direction. Do you have do you have these same issues like context window issues and hallucination issues when you're building your own foundation models for specific use cases?

In the video space, I think that is a little bit less concerned. The video space, the main thing is how to make it more realistic. Making it realistic is the biggest challenge and also make it accurate to the prompt. In our case, since we are doing more specialized video models, and we generally don't experience these issues.

I published my book in 2019, 60,000 words, we sold a lot of copies, watched it on a bestseller list. How close am I to be able to use Akool to update... Upload the PDF of my book, plus maybe the audiobook, so you have my voice, plus an image or two of me, and you make it a video?

That depends on what kind of video you want to make. If it's a avatar video, talking about reading the books, that's pretty simple. It's like a story and you want to see a scenery of what the book tells. I think we can already do quite many of these works piece by piece, and it should not be far to get the whole book to work. Yeah.

When you launched this business back in 2022, how did you get the first 100 customers?

When we first launched, we tried to close some b to b customers and some larger ones, and then the process is very slow, and 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. We get some organic traffic and people come by themselves and just pay by themselves online.

But really try to remember, I mean, when you launched, you didn't have traffic. Now today, you're getting 210,000 organic clicks a month based off Ahrefs' data that I'm showing here on my screen right now. How did you get the traffic in the early days? How did people know about you?

In the early days, we mainly got the from the... Get the users from the community. So quite many communities like Reddit and Facebook groups and Discord and so on. And we kind of show lots of the product demos.

So I see you have your own Reddit channel, r forward slash Akool underscore official. Was this the major driver of your first 100 customers or no?

No. This subreddit was created much more recently.

So you are just posting in random other subreddits?

In related communities for showing demo, without demos and so on.

I see. Okay. What else did you do to get your first 100 customers? So Reddit communities, what else?

There are some user groups already using video creation tools, and we try to talk with these customers and frequently schedule, like, one on one meetings and listen what they need and recommend them tools and so on.

Can you name one or two of those communities?

So Fiverr had lots of their, people, using, helping others to create videos, and we also talked with the people on the Fiverr.

So you told them, hey. Look. You're on Fiverr giving people video services like Face Swap. You should use Akool to get that work done faster.

Yeah. We we did that work, as well. So we did that before.

So... Did you write the first line of code in 2020? Are my notes right?

Yeah. About right. 2021 or 2020 or something like that. Yeah.

Okay. What did you finish 2021 at with total revenue?

It's very small. Around a 100 k or something.

Okay. And in 2022, what did you finish with?

Also about a 100 k.

So pretty flat.

Because the first first January one is part time, and twenty nine two is I just get out. I think at that time, we are... We spend most of the time pursuing large contracts, but was not having difficulties working on the clothing type of the large contracts, and it grow much.

And what did you finish within 2023?

2 to $3,000,000.

My notes tell me that that was your first big enterprise account. You landed Coca Cola, and they ran a six month campaign swapping several million faces. Tell me how you closed that deal.

So that team bombed, and they found us, and they they see their... Our technology the best on the market. And so they benchmarked a lot, so they decided to work with us.

Did you have AEs on your team that are looking for all the prosumers that sign up for Akool for $50 a month, if you see someone at cocacola.com, you proactively reach out to them? Or how does that actually work?

For this case, at that time, we don't have. And it's... Fully, they reach out to us, and 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. So they spent three months benchmark testing different stuff and the designing and so on. Yeah. But we get our first AE in 2004, and then

begin to do more of the sales and the management work. Well.

And so what did you finish 2024 with in terms of revenue?

Around the $1,213,000,000 dollar.

You said in 2025, you finished with about 25,000,000 of revenue, and you're gonna more than double that here in 2026. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Walk me through the team size today. How have you structured it, and how many folks are full time?

Our team is pretty dynamic. It it depend on their needs and so on. So we have 60 to 70 people on board.

How many are engineers? Like, 40?

Yeah. Around that.

Okay. And do you have any quota carrying sales reps or no?

Yeah. So we have about four, five quota carrying sales reps, and it's pretty standard to give $1,000,000 quota per person.

So I guess how many total customers are you serving today, and what's the average customer paying per month?

On the prosumer side, we have a lot. We have tens of thousands of customers. And on the enterprise and the SMB side, have several 100.

So is it fair to say all of your paying customers added up together, you have more than 30,000 paying?

I think so. Like 20 to 30,000, around 30,000 maybe.

But most of your growth is coming from the enterprise sales?

More recently.

Yeah. Like how much value can you add to one enterprise account if they start off paying $50 a month? Are you comfortable... Don't share the name, but are you comfortable sharing your largest contract value today?

It's it's actually usage based, but they pay us, like, around $4,000,000 a year. And What?

You have individual customers paying 4,000,000 a year.

No. No. No. They are contract on the b two b side.

That's still pretty incredible. What what what, makes them scale so quickly? When you say usage based, is it number of credits? How do you... What what value do you assign to each credit? How do they consume the credit?

We we provide credits and... To the users that's using their platform and its usage based. And some of them actually integrate into their software. And when they scale up their usage, they also scale up the API course. It's all through API usage.

Jeff, I have to tell you this respectfully. I asked this question because when I look at your pricing page, mean, this thing looks like shit. I'm so confused. I'm like, where do I go? There's so many sliders. What do I pay for? But this is working.

So, yeah, I think we we we provide, one more tier. So before, we only provide pro, pro max in the business. And, we just recently added a starter plan. So we kind of give people more options to get started. Yeah.

So how many videos are you... Are are your users altogether free and paid creating per day on Akool today?

About 500,000, I would say,

per day. Images, videos, and

all the assets created per day on Akool.

Is this bootstrapped, have you raised capital?

We raised capital, but it's a small amount.

When did you raise capital, and how little was it? What year?

We raised in total about $10,000,000 across our last four class years. And the last price round is about two years ago, and we are working a new price round and so on.

Interesting. Are you comfortable sharing what that what that valuation was in 2024, the last price round?

Around a $100,000,000 two years ago. We haven't haven't really raised the price ROM, but we take some safe notes at a much higher valuation. And we are thinking about a price wrong.

I mean, what's the market looking like today for valuations on companies growing as fast as yours? You're having conversations. I mean, do you think you can raise at a billion dollar valuation?

So the market is constantly changing on the valuation side for the company. A billion may be a stretch, but I think probably like half of it or something like that. But a billion could be a little bit stretch on the current market. Yeah.

If your old bosses at Google come back and say, Jeff, we want you back. Here's 500,000,000 all cash upfront. We wanna acquire Akool. Do you take the deal?

Likely, I will.

I love that you're honest. Most founders go, no, Nathan. Never. I wanna build this forever. And you're like, 500,000,000 cash up front. I'll take it. Alright. Well, Jeff, as we wrap up here, you look... You're a technologist by training. When you look at the technical side of pushing video creation forward, the next leap, what's the current bottleneck on the technical side?

The videos are still pretty hard to create a long form match and realistic videos and so on. How can we create one hour movie, EVLAY? And how can we make everyone able to create it? There's still some gaps over there. The foundation model technology is growing pretty fast. So I think pretty soon, people will be able to create very good movie quality videos by themselves.

Guys, scientists from Google in 2022, he saw where video was going and said, I'm quitting Google. I'm going all in on my side project. Last month, which was June 2026, did $3,000,000 of total sales, and users are now creating over half of million videos and images per day on his platform. Jeff, thank you for taking us to the top. If you enjoyed that interview, you should click here to subscribe to the channel so you don't miss

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