When Chad Hurley sold YouTube to Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, online video was still finding its legs. Now, nearly two decades removed from that defining moment, the co-founder is back—this time chasing a different kind of transformation.
His new venture, a stealth startup called EyeTell, sits at what may be the most hyped intersection in tech: artificial intelligence and content creation. The company has raised seed funding from A-Star Capital and Ron Conway, the Silicon Valley eminence whose early bets on Google, PayPal, and Twitter have become legend. But beyond those names and a handful of trademark filings, details remain scarce. Hurley, it seems, prefers to build in the shadows.
Incorporated in California in June 2023, EyeTell is developing what it describes as an AI-powered platform for script generation and mixed-media production. The pitch, according to the company's own materials, is straightforward if ambitious: "harness the power of a full scale production studio to transform your imagination into real life shows—right from your desktop."
Whether that promise can scale beyond marketing copy is another question entirely.
What the Filings Reveal
Trademark applications filed in Canada offer the clearest window into EyeTell's ambitions. The platform is designed to generate, host, and edit text, images, video, and multimedia content through both downloadable software and cloud-based tools. It's a sweeping vision—script generation, visual storytelling, collaboration features, even content marketplaces, all underpinned by AI.
Job postings, scattered across engineering boards, fill in the technical picture. EyeTell is building models around large language processing, computer vision, and generative media. More revealing, perhaps, is the emphasis on Apple's ecosystem. The engineering work includes on-device inference using Core ML and Apple's Neural Engine, which suggests the platform will run at least partially on users' own hardware rather than defaulting to the cloud. It's a consumer-facing bet, in other words, not an enterprise play.
That's a departure from some of the category's better-funded competitors, though it also raises questions about performance and scale.
The Team: Engineers and Storytellers
Hurley hasn't just assembled technologists. Andrew Gordon, a former Pixar animator and storyteller, joined as Chief Storyteller—a title that signals something beyond algorithmic brute force. Gordon's bio at Stern Strategy Group describes EyeTell as "a new platform that empowers anyone to harness the power of AI to tell their story." Whether that's aspiration or reality won't be clear until the product ships, but the hire suggests Hurley is at least thinking about narrative craft, not just output volume.
Reed Martin, a designer with experience in AR, VR, and machine learning at Twitter, came aboard in June 2023 to lead design. Brent Hurley, listed in corporate filings as secretary, CFO, and registered agent, rounds out the known leadership. Built In pegs the company at five employees, though that figure—like much else about EyeTell—is difficult to verify and almost certainly outdated by now.
Funding in the Shadows
The seed round closed in November 2023. The amount? Undisclosed. The names attached, though, carry weight. A-Star Capital and Ron Conway don't typically back experiments—they back founders with track records and markets with momentum. For Hurley, that means credibility, but it also means expectations.
Since then, the company has stayed quiet. A trademark application filed in October 2023 drew an opposition proceeding from Bausch & Lomb, the ophthalmic company, which dragged into 2025. (The irony of an eye-care giant opposing "EyeTell" was apparently not lost on the lawyers.) No final opposition appears to have materialized, and the Canadian trademark filing has moved forward, with examiner reports and correspondence continuing into this year.
A Crowded, Expensive Field
Hurley is entering a market that has become both exhilarating and brutally competitive. Synthesia, the AI avatar company, raised $200 million at a $4 billion valuation earlier this year. Runway, perhaps the most visible player in generative video, continues iterating with models like Gen-3 Alpha and the newer Gen-4. HeyGen pulled in a $60 million Series A. Pika Labs, though its 2023 funding round now feels like ancient history in AI terms, demonstrated early appetite for video generation tools.
What sets EyeTell apart—if anything does—seems to be the emphasis on end-to-end production. Not just video snippets, but scripts, multimedia integration, the whole storytelling stack. The desktop focus and Apple-centric engineering also hint at a different user: not the enterprise customer buying seats for a marketing team, but the individual creator working from a MacBook.
Whether that's a differentiated wedge or a limitation will depend on execution. And execution, for now, remains invisible.
Hiring Signals
The company is recruiting. Recent postings include iOS developers, UI and Swift engineers, front-end web developers, and a community manager. A role for an HR director appeared recently, which suggests the team is preparing to scale—or at least thinks it should be.
Combined with the trademark activity and team expansion, the hiring push indicates EyeTell may be nearing something more public. Maybe a beta. Maybe a launch. Hurley isn't saying, which is very much on brand for a founder who helped build YouTube in relative obscurity before the world noticed.
The question, of course, is whether lightning can strike twice. Hurley's first act reshaped how billions of people create and consume video. His second is unfolding in a market where the pace of change has accelerated, the capital requirements have ballooned, and the competition is fiercer than anything YouTube faced in 2005.
For now, EyeTell is a bet—on a founder, on a thesis, on the idea that AI-powered storytelling can be something more than text-to-video magic tricks. Whether it pays off is anyone's guess. But with Hurley at the helm and Conway in the cap table, it's at least a bet worth watching.
