Here's a question: Would you fly to Paris just to buy a baguette? It sounds ridiculous, but that simple street-interview concept turned into one of YouTube's most successful viral formats, racking up more than 1.8 billion views. The person behind it was Jay Neo, who joined MrBeast at 18 and spent his time obsessing over viewer retention graphs before leaving in 2023.
Now Neo is back with something new. He's launched Palo, an artificial intelligence platform designed to help creators figure out what's working, what's not, and what they should make next. The startup just raised $3.8 million from Peak XV's Surge program, with additional backing from NFX and individual investors, according to TechCrunch.
From Retention Graphs to Viral Gold
Neo's origin story is pretty straightforward. He joined the MrBeast team as a teenager and immediately dove into the numbers. His job was studying metrics to pinpoint exactly where audiences checked out of videos.
"I was so obsessed with retention graphs and figuring out why viewers stayed or why they left," Neo told TechCrunch. "I had a document where I noted all this down."
That obsession paid off. The Paris baguette concept became such a hit that MrBeast produced multiple videos following the same structure. After leaving, Neo co-founded several channels under the Creaky brand with another former MrBeast writer. Those channels hit over 1 billion views monthly, according to TechCrunch.
What Palo Actually Does
The platform starts by having creators connect their social media accounts. From there, Palo analyzes short-form video content to figure out what performs well and what falls flat.
Shivam Kumar, Palo's chief technology officer and a former Palantir (PLTR) engineer, explained the technical side. The platform uses multiple models to build a data structure that captures hooks, audience reactions, topic interest, originality, and potential search terms.
"The inference engine takes these primary data points and then uses a cocktail of top large language models to hierarchically aggregate these data points into cache for hot memory, embeddings which can later be semantically retrieved, and various other structured data formats," Kumar told TechCrunch.
Translation: Palo creates a "persona" for each creator based on their unique style and preferences. Creators interact with it through a conversational interface, similar to chatbots. The tool can generate scripts based on proven formulas or create visual storyboards for creators who work more with imagery than dialogue.
Who Can Use It and What It Costs
Palo tested the platform with about 40 creators who each had followings exceeding 1 million across various platforms. Now it's opening access to creators with at least 100,000 followers, according to the company's website.
The base subscription starts at $250 per month. Higher pricing tiers are available for creators who need expanded usage capabilities.
"Creators everywhere are looking for tools that make their process smoother without taking away their voice," Peak XV Managing Director Rajan Anandan told TechCrunch. "Jay and the team had unusual clarity about where the real value lies and where it does not, which gave us strong conviction."
The Formula Debate
There's an obvious concern here: Does AI just push everyone toward making the same repetitive content? Neo has a response ready. He compared Palo to how comedians refine material based on audience response.
"Here's an analogy… when a comedian tries out some new material on the stage, they're both consciously and subconsciously gathering data on whether the audience was amused or not," Neo told TechCrunch. "Each performance becomes an iteration, and each new audience benefits from what the comedian learned from the show before."
Whether that analogy holds up remains to be seen. But for creators trying to figure out why their videos work or don't work, Palo offers something practical: data-driven insights from someone who's actually built viral hits before. The difference between this and other AI tools is that Neo has the receipts—1.8 billion views worth of them.
