The Startup Behind This Year's No. 1 Inc. 5000 Spot, And the Playbook Driving Its Surge What the fastest-growing company in America can teach you about speed, reliability, and building products customers can't live without.

When the Inc. 5000 list dropped this year, the No. 1 position didn't go to a consumer darling or a well-funded fintech. It went to AKOOL, an AI-video company that's transforming how organizations of every size and sector communicate, create, and connect, and it's getting harder for anyone to ignore.

This isn't a "cool demo" story. It's a blueprint for building a product so deeply integrated into the way customers work that replacing it feels impossible. And it's a case study in how persistence, proximity to users, and repeatable execution create compounding growth.

Founded by Dr. Jiajun "Jeff" Lu, this Palo Alto-based team built what others in AI-video promise but rarely deliver: a platform that's fast, reliable, and embedded into the systems customers already use.

The Problem They Solved First

Many AI-video startups chase novelty. This team chased bottlenecks.

Enterprises needed to communicate across dozens of languages, time zones, and bandwidth realities, without weeks of production or endless reshoots. Localization dragged. Training fell behind product cycles. Global events stalled under logistics.

Lu's answer: make AI video callable like software. Live lip-synced translation, real-time face-swapping, avatar-led explainers, and motion synthesis from still images, integrated directly into tools companies already use, from LMSs to CRM campaigns. No rip-and-replace required.

Founder takeaway: If adoption forces a process reboot, you've moved the friction, not removed it.

From Prototype to Platform Powerhouse

By 2022, the company had evolved from a research project into a unified AI video suite, running both live and on-demand. API-first architecture meant customers could integrate in days, not months. Reference apps and templates turned first pilots into instant wins.

That was the beginning of their repeatable sales motion: land in one department with a high-impact use case, prove value fast, and expand across teams and geographies.

"One global retailer started using us for localized training," Lu recalls. "Six months later, marketing, HR, and customer support were all using the same platform. That's when you know the sales motion is working, you don't have to resell, you just keep delivering."

Real-World Proof: Coca-Cola and AWS

Coca-Cola's "Ultimate You" campaign used advanced face-swap technology to let fans see themselves inside a game world. It was personalized, viral, and fun, and it came to AKOOL not because of a pitch, but because the product quality spoke for itself.

At AWS Summit India, the company deployed a real-time AI avatar powered by AWS infrastructure, acting as an interactive event guide while meeting enterprise standards for latency, privacy, and scale.

These aren't flashy one-offs. They're proof that when the stakes are high, some of the biggest brands in the world trust this platform to perform live.

Speed + Reliability = Growth That Sticks

Speed alone doesn't win enterprise deals, it has to hold up at scale.

That's why the company built engineering hubs in Singapore and Bangalore. These weren't "global presence" gestures—they put compute power closer to high-demand, diverse markets, cutting latency and improving user experience even during peak loads.

As Lu says, "Enterprises don't buy features, they buy proven performance."

Founder takeaway: Demonstrate the performance you can deliver consistently in real-world conditions. That's what earns trust.

Why Customers Stay for the Long Term

A single sale is good. A customer who builds you into their workflow is game-changing.

Broadcasters now rely on the platform for daily live localization. Training providers embed it into their LMS for every new course. One B2B software giant integrated it into their support system to generate multilingual help videos automatically.

"Once we're in the workflow, we're hard to get rid of," says Lu. "That's by design."

This deep integration creates long-term client relationships—where renewals are a given and expansion happens naturally.

The Founder's Playbook

Lu's personal approach has shaped the company's culture and growth strategy:

1. Insist, don't give up. "Persistence is everything. You're going to get knocked down. You keep going."
2. Get closer to the users. Lu spent two years working in customer success and sales himself, answering tickets, sitting in client meetings—to understand exactly what customers needed and how they worked.
3. Be hands-on. "If you don't know what's happening day to day, you can't make the right decisions."
4. Product is #1. Coca-Cola approached them because the product was undeniably good, not because of a marketing push.
5. Build a repeatable sales motion. Land, deliver, expand—again and again.
6. Integrate into the workflow. Make your product essential to daily operations so removing it is more painful than keeping it.

Pricing That Matches Reality

Generative workloads fluctuate. The hybrid model—base commitment plus usage within clear guardrails, balances predictability for finance teams with flexibility for users, lowering adoption risk while protecting margins.

Four Moves Founders Can Steal This Quarter

1. Deliver Day-One value. Give customers something they can launch immediately.
   Be transparent about performance. Let them see latency, uptime, and routing in real time.
2. Go deep before you go wide. Perfect a handful of high-impact capabilities.
   Make privacy and localization non-negotiable. In regulated or diverse markets, they're often the reason you win.

The Road Ahead

Lu's next focus is full orchestration of live, real-time, on-device video experiences—making it as easy to run a multi-location, multilingual broadcast as it is to start a Zoom call, without sacrificing quality, security, or scale.

On the near horizon: real-time sentiment overlays so presenters can instantly "read the room" and adjust; adaptive virtual sets that update on the fly without green screens; and unified dashboards to control multi-stream events, moderation, and analytics from a single interface.

This is the natural extension of what got them to No. 1: every new capability is designed to work live, at scale, in the environments customers already use, without creating new friction or forcing costly workflow changes.

The principle stays the same: treat live video like software, interactive, programmable, and seamlessly integrated into the systems organizations already use to communicate in the moment.

Bottom line for Entrepreneur readers: You don't have to out-Hollywood the studio system; you have to out-ship it. Lu's playbook, architect for speed, sell outcomes, publish reliability, and meet customers inside the tools they already use—won't trend on social. But it will show up where it counts: in customer renewals, in expansion, and, eventually, on scoreboards like the Inc. 5000.