In an exclusive interview with Indian Startup Times, Saurabh Gupta, founder of Intellemo.AI, explains why the company moved from a broader digital marketing platform into AI video production. His conviction is simple: businesses can now generate videos, but they still struggle to plan, approve and revise them predictably. Intellemo.AI is building the workflow layer that turns AI-generated clips into campaign assets brands can actually use.
The origin: marketing was too dependent on specialists and manual work
Saurabh started Intellemo.AI in 2018 because making and running good marketing was too dependent on specialist teams and repetitive manual work. The team tried to turn that work into a product, but working with customers also pulled them into hands-on execution. That experience taught them where software helped and where the process still broke down. Over time, creative production became the clearest bottleneck. AI video gave Intellemo.AI a way to revisit its original ambition: make production more accessible without taking control away from the marketer.
The ₹35,000 quote that became a ₹75,000 lesson
A particular customer project convinced Saurabh to focus on AI video. Intellemo.AI quoted ₹35,000 for an automobile AI video and ended up consuming roughly ₹75,000 in AI generation credits. Even after that spending, the team did not have a reliable approval process for the client. “It was a sharp lesson: the cost of an AI video is not just the price of the final generation. It includes every attempt, correction and rejected output along the way,” Saurabh says. That experience led Intellemo.AI to build a workflow where the direction could be approved earlier and specific parts could be fixed without repeatedly starting over.
From impressive clips to campaign-ready assets
Many tools can generate an impressive clip, but turning those clips into an advertisement a brand can approve and use requires more. The shots need to tell one story. The product must look right, the message must be clear, and the voice, characters and visual details must hold together across scenes. A marketing team also needs a practical way to give feedback. An impressive clip can be a useful starting point, but a campaign asset has to survive review by the people responsible for the brand and the business goal.
How Intellemo.AI’s workflow works: brief to finished video?
In Intellemo.AI, a team starts with an idea or script and adds relevant context, such as the product, characters, setting and voice. The platform develops the story in stages: script, audio, storyboard, clips and final render. People can review the message and planned visuals before generating the finished video. If a voiceover, frame or shot is wrong, they can focus their feedback on that part while retaining work they have already approved. This targeted revision approach is central to Intellemo.AI’s value proposition: avoid rebuilding everything when only one element needs fixing.
The hardest problems: story coherence and brand consistency
Story coherence is still one of the hardest problems in AI video. Good individual shots do not automatically make a good advertisement. A product or character also needs to remain recognisable from scene to scene, and revising one part should not disturb the rest. Intellemo.AI has built controls around these problems, but Gupta is candid that AI video has not solved them completely. Improving that reliability is a major part of the company’s work going forward.
Making AI generation costs understandable
AI generation costs can be unpredictable, and Intellemo.AI is addressing this by letting people review the storyboard before committing video seconds. The company prices around the duration of video produced rather than asking customers to track a different credit charge for every small action. Targeted revisions also matter: a customer should be able to correct the part that needs work instead of paying to rebuild everything. There are still real compute costs behind generation, so Intellemo.AI’s responsibility is to make the process and its cost as clear as possible.
Who is using and paying for the product?
Intellemo.AI sees interest from founders, marketers, brands and agencies. The most valuable conversations are with teams that already make AI videos and know how expensive repeated generations and client revisions can become. A first purchase tells Intellemo.AI someone was willing to try the workflow; repeat production is a stronger test of whether the platform has become useful to their business. That is the behaviour the company is working to earn and measure.
The 2022 raise and the later pivot to AI video
Intellemo.AI raised approximately $350,000 in 2022 in a round led by Inflection Point Ventures. At that stage, the company was building a broader digital marketing platform, including video advertising technology. The funding helped invest in the team and product. The move toward cinematic AI video came later, as the models improved and Intellemo.AI’s production work exposed a more specific problem: businesses could generate videos, but still struggled to plan, approve and revise them predictably.
What remains valuable as models improve?
With AI models improving quickly, Saurabh believes brands will still need a dependable way to turn a brief into a coherent video, keep their context intact, involve people in approvals and make precise changes. Intellemo.AI wants to handle the complexity of choosing and combining models so the team can focus on the result. The proof, over the next year, will be whether customers return to produce real campaigns, find revisions easier, and can plan their production costs with confidence.
Interview By: Sejal Thakur
