In the same Palo Alto, California, building where Mark Zuckerberg grew Facebook in 2005, Jeff Lu now leads Akool, the generative AI platform that has created lifelike avatars for Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Google, and Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA). The company ranks No. 1 on this year's Inc. 5000 list, Inc. reports.
From Microsoft Intern to $40M AI Founder: How Jeff Lu Built One of America's Fastest-Growing Company
Lu, 35, began his career as a Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) intern before earning a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. Inc. says he later joined Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) to work on Face ID technology for the iPhone, then moved to Google Cloud to focus on video processing services before leaving in 2020 due to what he described as restrictive policies on generative AI at the time.
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Lu launched Akool as a side project, generating just over $100,000 in revenue in its second year and quickly building a 10-person team. Using eight graphics processing units, the startup trained specialized AI video "human models" in weeks, enabling the creation of digital avatars from photos, videos, or fully AI-generated characters, Inc. reports.
How a Coca-Cola League of Legends Campaign Catapulted Akool Into Global Marketing Fame
Akool's breakthrough came in early 2023 when it secured a project for Coca-Cola through a marketing agency that had benchmarked its technology against other tools on the market. Inc. says Coca-Cola selected Akool for a campaign promoting Coca-Cola Ultimate, a product collaboration with the video game League of Legends.
The campaign used Akool's AI face-swapping technology to let users place their faces onto the main character in a promotional video by uploading a selfie. It ran for six months in more than 80 countries and generated several million face swaps, Inc. reports.
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Akool turned the project into a case study and used it in an email campaign targeting marketing agencies, which Inc. says helped the startup gain new business through word-of-mouth in the industry.
Streaming Avatars and AI Video Translation Push Akool's Revenue
In 2024, Inc. says Akool launched two high-demand features: a streaming avatar capable of real-time conversation and a video translation tool that converts videos into other languages while syncing mouth movements to the translated audio.
According to Inc., the video translation tool accounts for about 30% of company revenue, while streaming avatars generate roughly half of business-to-business sales.
The company partnered with Amazon Web Services, Google, and Nvidia to showcase these capabilities in technology demonstrations at their conferences and developed retail-focused avatars for companies in Asia to interact with shoppers, Inc. says.
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Inside Akool's Live Video AI Technology That Rivals Google, OpenAI, and Adobe
By 2025, Inc. reports that Akool's revenue had reached $40 million, supported by a hybrid workforce of around 100 employees, two-thirds of whom are in engineering and a third on the business side, with about half working in the office.
The company's live video tools enable real-time speech translation during meetings and can replace a person's body with a responsive avatar that follows their movements. Lu told Inc. that Akool's live video expertise is ahead of competitors such as Google, OpenAI, and Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE), although the market remains highly competitive.
With strong cash flow, Inc. says Akool plans to build larger AI models, including its own video foundation and voice-generation systems, with the goal of making avatar-generated videos indistinguishable from real life.
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