David Hwang and Alex Yee Built an AI That Decides What Creators Post. It Says It Made 2 Billion Views in Two Months.

Two friends who have known each other since middle school are now telling the internet that virality is a solved engineering problem.

Their company is called Grocalo. It went through Y Combinator's S26 batch, is based in Los Angeles, lists zero employees, and describes itself as an "AI brain that runs content for creators." Menlo Times listed it among YC's launches of the week, founded by David Hwang and Alex Yee.

The pitch, in Grocalo's own words: it uses video understanding and deep platform analytics "to bottle up the taste behind each creator" and then personalize and distribute content to creator-specific audiences. The company says it handles distribution, engagement and growth across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Threads.

Read that again with a course seller's brain on. Taste. Cadence. Distribution. The three things almost every knowledge business treats as the irreducibly human part of the job.

The numbers, and where they come from

On its YC listing, Grocalo says it generated 2 billion views and gained 4 million followers for its creators in the last two months.

It also names them. The listed clients include King Bach (72M followers), Steven He (30M), Leenda Dong (28M), Sheena Melwani (18M), comedian Jimmy O. Yang (11M) and TV host Jeannie Mai (6M).

Every one of those figures is self-reported by the company on a page the company controls. There is no third-party audit, no platform-verified breakdown, no disclosure of how much of the 2 billion came from one or two accounts that were already enormous. We could not find independent verification of the view or follower totals, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.

What's interesting isn't whether the number is 2 billion or 200 million. It's the claim underneath it: that the company is building "the most advanced AI brain capable of replicating virality for any given audience."

Why the founders think they can do it

This is not two engineers who read a Later blog post.

Yee is a second-time YC founder who built and sold Onederful (YC W18). Hwang spent five-plus years in investment banking and, for the last four years, has worked with his partner to grow her content end-to-end, which the listing says produced 10 billion views and 5 million followers.

That second line is the actual origin story. One person ran one creator's content operation manually at enormous scale, found the repeatable parts, and is now trying to sell the repeatable parts to everybody else.

The part that should bother course sellers

Most knowledge businesses are built on a single load-bearing assumption: that free organic reach is earned by a human who understands the audience better than a machine could.

You write the hook. You feel out the comments. You know the one story that converts. That instinct is the top of the funnel, and the funnel is the business.

Grocalo's entire proposition is that the instinct can be modeled, then run at volume, and that the customers who'll pay for it first are the ones with 30 and 72 million followers already. Not beginners looking for a shortcut. The people who are best at this, buying it as infrastructure.

"Content should be personalized and data-driven," the company writes.

If that turns out to be right at scale, organic distribution stops being a talent and starts being a line item. The creators who win are the ones who buy the better brain, the same way paid acquisition became a question of who has the better bidder and the bigger budget.

If it turns out to be wrong, it'll be wrong in a specific way worth watching for: an audience quietly noticing that the account sounds slightly off, the cadence slightly too regular, the posts technically correct and emotionally flat. Views are the metric the company reports. Trust is the metric that sells a $997 course.

Grocalo is two months of claims old and has a clients list most agencies would spend a decade chasing. The next number to watch isn't views. It's whether any of those six creators are still on the platform a year from now, and whether anyone publishes a figure that someone other than the company counted.