How One Customer Unlocked an AI Startup’s Growth
Akool made about $100K a year for two years. Then Coca-Cola found it. CEO Jeff Lu explains how small task-specific video models got Akool past $3 million a month.
· 4 min read
Jeff Lu, founder and CEO of Akool · Top Founders
Jeff Lu is founder and CEO of Akool, a generative AI video platform for avatars, face swap, video translation and real-time video. He has more than 10 years of experience in AI and computer vision. He worked at Microsoft, at Apple on Face ID and at Google Cloud. He left Google in 2022 to work on Akool full time.
Summary
Lu built Akool on small video models designed for single tasks, which keep costs low and quality high on hard cases. Revenue sat near $100K a year for two years while he chased big contracts, then jumped after Coca-Cola found Akool and ran a face-swap campaign. Akool made about $25 million in 2025 and over $3 million in June 2026, with 60 to 70 people and about $10 million raised. Lu says the next technical challenge is long, realistic video. These signals are from a Top Founders interview with Jeff Lu.
- Leaving Google. Lu had worked on generative AI for images and video for a long time and saw the technology maturing. Google was conservative about generative video because it couldn't fully control the results. Lu had worked on Akool part time during COVID. In 2022 he quit Google Cloud to run it full time. ▶ 1:23
Quote: “At that time, Google is pretty conservative ... generative AI, especially on videos and so on. They they think they cannot control the results. And they want everything to be 100% under control.” (Jeff Lu, ▶ 1:31)
