Jeff Lu's $40M Rise to America's Fastest-Growing Company: Inside Akool's AI Avatar Platform

Jeff Lu, founder of AI startup Akool, has led the company to a No. 1 ranking on this year's Inc. 5000 list with a revenue of $40M. Akool has created lifelike avatars for Coca-Cola, Amazon, Google, and Nvidia, and its breakthrough came with a campaign for Coca-Cola promoting a product collaboration with League of Legends. The company has since launched high-demand features like real-time conversation streaming avatars and video translation tools.

Title: Akool's Ascension: A $40M AI Startup Disrupting the Market

Jeff Lu, the founder of AI startup Akool, has catapulted the company to a No. 1 ranking on this year's Inc. 5000 list, achieving a revenue of $40M. Akool's lifelike avatars have been utilized by major corporations such as Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Google, and Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA). The company's breakthrough came with a campaign for Coca-Cola promoting a product collaboration with the video game League of Legends. Since then, Akool has launched high-demand features like real-time conversation streaming avatars and video translation tools, further cementing its position in the market [1].

Lu began his career as a Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) intern before earning a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He later worked on Face ID technology for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and video processing services at Google Cloud. After leaving Google in 2020 due to restrictive policies on generative AI, Lu launched Akool as a side project. The startup quickly gained traction, generating over $100,000 in revenue in its second year and building a 10-person team [1].

Akool's technology enables the creation of digital avatars from photos, videos, or fully AI-generated characters using specialized AI video "human models" trained in weeks. The company's breakthrough came in early 2023 when it secured a project for Coca-Cola through a marketing agency. 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. This campaign ran for six months in over 80 countries and generated several million face swaps [1].

In 2024, 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. These features account for about 30% and roughly half of business-to-business sales, respectively. 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 [1].

By 2025, 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 [1].

With strong cash flow, 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 [1].

References:
1. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coca-cola-amazon-google-nvidia-163146746.html
2. [2] https://www.inkl.com/news/coca-cola-amazon-google-and-nvidia-have-used-this-startup-s-ai-avatars-inside-jeff-lu-s-40m-rise-to-america-s-fastest-growing-company
3. [3] https://technosports.co.in/nvidia-blackwell-gb200-dominates-ai-inference/