‘Is Soumil Singh New Zealand’s smartest teen?’ a Herald headline asked in 2016, as a profile detailed how the Hamilton Boys’ High School dux, then 18, had turned down 10 of the world’s top universities.
He was still mulling where to pursue a degree.

Fast forward to 2024 and Singh, now based in New York, is co-founder and chief executive of Unfaze.ai – an artificial intelligence start-up.

Unfaze takes your conversational-language text prompts, and pics you upload, then turns them into a short-form promotional video to post on TikTok or YouTube to generate organic traffic, or serve as a paid ad.

The launch of its text-to-video service is slated for July. While the AI content field is crowded, Singh says Unfaze.ai will be the first to fully automate the process of creating short-form promotional clips for social media.

His firm has not created its own foundation AI model. Instead, it’s incorporating technology from Stable Diffusion and other artificial intelligence players who offer open-source (community-maintained) platforms – then adapting it to be user-friendly for a real-life task. “We augment them and fine-tune them for niche use cases – short-form promo brands.

He promises “a viral video within minutes”, whether you’re a solo creator or a brand.

The video service spans from a free, watermarked version that includes five minutes of content then goes up in tiers to $449 per month full-blooded plan that includes up to 1000 minutes of video. Singh pitches it as cheaper than roping in an agency. He says the price reflects the value of the product – and also the fact that it’s pricey to buy AI compute power in the cloud at a time when providers are scrambling to build data centres (or “AI factories” as they’re now often called) fast enough.

So how did that 2016 varsity decision turn out?

During a family visit home to Hamilton this week, Singh (now 26) said he ultimately decided on Harvard. He chose the Ivy League university in part because of a liberal arts programme that allowed him to chart a free-form course for two years before settling on a major. But there were also some minor attractions, including a cricket team – on which he was captain, opening bowler and a middle-order batsman (”We went to the college championships but the level in the US is not quite the same.”)

“I had a rebellious streak,” Singh said. On the face of things, that seems a stretch for a pupil who was dux, head prefect and a debating champ, among other honours, but it did apply to his career path.

“The only thing I knew was that I didn’t want to go into medicine.” Both his parents were doctors, and his older brother was in med school.

He wound up an entrepreneur.

After graduating in 2020, with a BA in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, he co-founded BikePath, a San Francisco startup that makes software for running a micro-mobility firm – including an algorithm that reveals where to distribute e-bikes and e-scooters to maximise revenue.

BikePath drew backing from Y-Combinator, perhaps Silicon Valley’s best-known business incubator and funder of early-stage firms. It was the first investor in Airbnb and Dropbox, among other hits.

When Singh left BikePath to concentrate on Unfaze.ai, Y-Combinator chipped in to support a US$3.4m ($5.9m) funding round that also included former Dreamworks and Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo fund, Hack VC, Soma Capital, Eniac Ventures and Pioneer Fund.

“With traditional tools, you have to think of an idea, write a script, collate all the images and video snippets and then decide how to bring them together,” Singh said.

“Alternatively, now you could just upload your product image, tell AI your idea press a button and have it generate one or multiple versions of the video and even automatically schedule and post them to your social media accounts.”

He added, “With apps like TikTok, the model content allows businesses to post content that can organically expand its reach – which means that there is no additional cost each time someone views or clicks on the video.

“Under this model, the cost of a campaign is centred in the production of each piece of content. To produce an effective result requires multiple different versions to be tested and even then the video can’t be reused indefinitely.

“But when we use AI to remove this constraint, it allows even very small businesses with low budgets to drive organic traffic efficiently and potentially expose themselves to a global audience of millions of viewers.”

Unfaze is getting closer to the production of AI-generated videos that are indistinguishable from manually created content, Singh said.

“This is really the Holy Grail of video creation and with the speed at which AI is evolving, we expect to reach this point within a matter of months, not years.”

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.