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Launch HN: Golpo (YC S25) – AI-generated explainer videos

https://video.golpoai.com/
30•skar01•2h ago
Hey HN! We’re Shraman and Shreyas Kar, building Golpo (https://video.golpoai.com), an AI generator for whiteboard-style explainer videos, capable of creating videos from any document or prompt.

We’ve always made videos to communicate any concept and felt like it was the clearest way to communicate. But making good videos was time-consuming and tedious. It required planning, scripting, recording, editing, syncing voice with visuals. Even a 2-minute video could take hours.

AI video tools are impressive at generating cinematic scenes and flashy content, but struggle to explain a product demo, walk through a complex workflow, or teach a technical topic. People still spend hours making explainer videos manually because existing AI tools aren’t built for learning or clarity.

Our solution is Golpo. Our video generation engine generates time-aligned graphics with spoken narration that are good for onboarding, training, product walkthroughs, and education. It’s fast, scalable, and built from the ground up to help people understand complex ideas through simple storytelling.

Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_LGM0dEyDA#t=7.

Golpo is built specifically for use cases involving explaining, learning, and onboarding. In our (obviously biased!) opinion, it feels authentic and engaging in a way no other AI video generator does.

Golpo can generate videos in over 190 languages. After it generates a video, you can fully customize its animations by just describing the changes you want to see in each motion graphic it generates in natural language.

It was challenging to get this to work! Initially, we used a code-generation approach with Manim, where we fine-tuned a language model to emit Python animation scripts directly from the input text. While promising for small examples, this quickly became brittle, and the generated code usually contained broken imports, unsupported transforms, and poor timing alignment between narration and visuals. Debugging and regenerating these scripts was often slower than creating them manually.

We also explored training a custom diffusion-based video model, but found it impractical for our needs. Diffusion could produce high-fidelity cinematic scenes, but generating coherent sequences beyond about 30 seconds was unreliable without complex stitching, making edits required regenerating large portions of the video, and visuals frequently drifted from the instructional intent, especially for abstract or technical topics. Also, we did not have the compute to scale this.

Existing state-of-the-art systems like Sora and Veo 3 face similar limitations: they are optimized for cinematic storytelling, not step-by-step educational content, and they lack both the deterministic control needed for time-aligned narration and the scalability for 5–10 minute explainers.

In the end, we took a different path of training a reinforcement learning agent to “draw” whiteboard strokes, step-by-step, optimized for clear, human-like explanations. This worked well because the action space was simple and the environment was not overly complex, allowing the agent to learn efficient, precise, and consistent drawing behaviors.

Here are some sample videos that Golpo generated:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33xNoWHYZGA (Whiteboard Gym - the tech behind Golpo itself)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_ZwKhptUqI (How do RNNs work?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxFKo-2sWCM (function pointers in C)

https://golpo-podcast-inputs.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/file... (basic intro to Gödel's theorem)

You can try Golpo here: https://video.golpoai.com, and we will set you up with 2 credits. We’d love your feedback, especially on what feels off, what you’d want to control, and how you might use it. Comments welcome!

Comments

typs•2h ago
If that demo video is how it actually works, this is a pretty amazing technical feat. I’m definitely going to try this out.

Edit: I've used. It's amazing. I'm going to be using this a lot.

skar01•14m ago
Thank you!!
mclau157•2h ago
I have used AI in the past to learn a topic but by creating a GUI with input sliders and output that I can see how things change when I change parameters, this could work here where people can basically ask "what if x happens" and see the result which also makes them feel in control of the learning
skar01•2h ago
Hey also, if you want to suggest a video, we could try generating one and reply here with a link! Just tell us what you want the video to be about!!
cube2222•2h ago
Hey, kudos for the product / demo on the website - it managed to keep me engaged to watch it till the end.

I’m mostly curious how it fairs with more complex topics and doing actually informative (rather than just “plain background”) illustrations.

Like a video explaining transformer attention in LLMs, to stay on the AI topic?

skar01•1h ago
Yeah so it actually does pretty well. Here are some sample videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33xNoWHYZGA&t=1s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_ZwKhptUqI

metalliqaz•2h ago
So... if I had the enterprise accounts for various LLM services, could I dupe this company with a basic upload page and a nice big prompt?
Wolf_Larsen•2h ago
Its not that simple, but it would be straight forward to duplicate the outputs of this with a simple LLM + ffmpeg workflow. They did mention a custom model on the landing page, and if they've trained one then you would be spending much more money on each output than they are. Because without a fine-tuned model there would be a lot of inference done for QA and refinement of each prompt | clip | frame .
Lienetic•2h ago
I'm curious - do you feel differently about some of these coding and coding-adjacent tools out there like Cursor and Lovable?
metalliqaz•57m ago
no, not really. I think they are massively over-valued but in the tech world... what else is new? I view those tools as mostly a convenience. They are integrating things into nice easy packages to use. That's the value.

With this... eh. Most people don't need to make more than one or two explainer videos, so are they going to take on a new monthly fee for that? And then there are power users who do it all the time, but almost surely have their own workflow put together that is customized to exactly what they want.

At any point, one of the big players could introduce this as a feature for their main product.

poly2it•2h ago
The creator tier ($99.99/mo) lists "15 seconds" as a perk. Does this mean the maximum video length is 15 seconds?
bangaladore•2h ago
Given that the next tier up is "Create longer/more detailed video (up to 4 min long)", I'd guess you are right.

Seems like this is pretty useless unless you pay 200$ per month. Which may be a reasonable number for the clearly commercial / enterprise use case, but I'm just not certain what you can do wtih the lower tiers.

skar02•1h ago
One of the founders here! No it's not. The max video length is up to 2 min, which is also the case in any non-free tier. We just include a 15-second option for that tier (because people it need for things like FB ads)
metalliqaz•2h ago
My suggestion would be to re-think the demo videos. I have only watched most of the way into the "function pointers in C" example. If I didn't already know C well, I would not be able to follow that. The technical diagrams don't stay on the screen long enough for new learners to process the information. These videos probably look fantastic to the person who wrote the document it summarizes, but to a newbie the information is fleeting and hard to follow. The machine doesn't understand that the screen shouldn't be completely wiped all the time while it follows the narrative. Some visuals should be static for paragraphs, or stay visible while detail marked up around it. For a true master of the art, see 3blue1brown.
bangaladore•2h ago
> For a true master of the art, see 3blue1brown.

I agree. Rather than (what I assume is) E2E text -> video/audio output, it seems like training a model on how to utilize the community fork of manim which 3blue1brown uses for videos would produce a better result.

[1] https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim/

albumen•34m ago
Manim is awesome and I'd love to see that, but it doesn't easily offer the "hand-drawn whiteboard" look they've got currently.
WasimBhai•2h ago
I have 2 credits but it won't let me generate a video. Founders, if you are around, you may want to debug.
skar02•1h ago
Huh, that's odd. Could you DM me your email?
skar01•1h ago
Or just email us at founders@golpoai.com
delbronski•2h ago
Wow, I was skeptical at first, but the result was pretty awesome!

Congrats! Cool product.

Feedback: I tried making a product explainer video for a tree planting rover I’m working on. The rover looked different in every scene. I can imagine this kind of consistency may be more difficult to get right. Maybe if I had uploaded a photo of how the rover looks it may have helped. In one scene the rover looks like an actual rover, in the other it looks like a humanoid robot.

But still, super impressed!

skar01•1h ago
Thanks! We are working on the consistency.
KaoruAoiShiho•2h ago
Did NotebookLM just come out with this? Very tough to compete with google.
adi4213•2h ago
This is neat but I wasn’t able to get it to work (server overloaded is what the browser app said) I’d also recommend registering a custom domain in Supabase so the Google SSO shows the golpo domain - which is a small, but professional-signaling affordance
skar01•12m ago
We will soon! Wanted to get the model working first! Could you try again
ishita159•2h ago
Planning to add links as input anytime soon?

I would love to add a link to my product docs, upload some images and have it generate an onboarding video of the platform.

skar02•1h ago
Yes, very soon. We already support this via API and will add to our platform too!
reactordev•2h ago
This is actually pretty amazing. Not only does it work, it’s good. At least from the demo videos. YMMV.

What I always wanted to do was to teach what I know but I lack the time commitment to get it out. This might be a way…

skar01•1h ago
Thank you so much!
CalRobert•1h ago
So it eats concepts and makes videos?

One is reminded of smbc

https://www.seekpng.com/png/detail/213-2132749_gulpo-decal-f...

skar02•1h ago
Haha! The name actually comes from the word story in Bengali.
ceroxylon•1h ago
The generated graphic in the linked demo for "Training materials that captivate" is a sketch of someone looking forlorn while holding a piece of paper. Is there a way to do in-line edits to the generated result to polish out things like this?
skar01•13m ago
We are working on that. There will ultimately be a storyboard feature where you can edit frame by frame!
nextworddev•1h ago
Has anyone tried prompting VEO to create these videos
skar02•1h ago
We have! Veo I believe, can't do more than 8-second videos, and when prompted they aren't very coherent in our experience.
nextworddev•59m ago
oh had no idea. will try your product
OG_BME•1h ago
I created a video on the free tier, the shareable link didn't work (404), I upgraded to be able to download it, and it seems to have disappeared? It says "Still generating" in my Library.

The video UUID starts with "f5fbd6c7", hopefully that's sufficient to identify me!

skar02•1h ago
Sorry about that! I found your video. Should I link it here or DM it to you (can you do DM in Hacker News?) ? You could also email me at shreyas2@stanford.edu, and I can send it there
dang•42m ago
(No DMs on HN, at least not yet)
OG_BME•29m ago
Just emailed you! Thanks.
Lienetic•1h ago
This is really interesting, definitely going to give it a try! Seems fun but are you seeing people actually needing to make lots of videos like this? What's your vision - how does this become really big?
drawnwren•1h ago
I'm sure someone else has mentioned this but your video on the main page correctly has GRPO the first time it's introduced but then every time you mention it after that -- you've swapped it to GPRO.
tk90•1h ago
Pretty cool, especially the voice and background music - feels just right.

I asked it about pointers in Rust. The transcript and images were great, very approachable!

"Do not let your computer sleep" -> is this using GPU on my machine or something?

skar01•37m ago
No! We just had that because we had not built the library feature yet, and just forgot to remove it. Now you can access through there!!
subhro•1h ago
From one Kar to another, দূর্দান্ত গল্প Congratulations.
skar02•1h ago
Thanks!
albumen•25m ago
Love it. The tone is just right. A couple of suggestions:

Have you tried a "filled line" approach, rather than "outlined" strokes? Might feel more like individual marker strokes.

I made a demo video on the free tier and it did a great job explaining acoustic delay lines in an accessible fashion, after feeding it a catalog PDF with an overview of the historical artefact and photography of an example unit. Unfortunately the service invented its own idea of what the artefact looked like. Could you offer a storyboard view and let users erase the incorrect parts and sketch their own shapes? Or split the drawing up into logical elements and the user could redraw them as needed, which would then be reused where that element is used in other frames?

skar01•10m ago
Thank you!! We are actually currently working on the storyboarding feature!!

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