Mehul Agarwal, a computer science alumnus from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), first conceived the idea of converting his stand-up comedy jokes into films without incurring high production costs. This vision culminated in the recent beta launch of Koyal.AI on September 9, a revolutionary audio-to-video filmmaking platform developed by Mehul, 23, and his sister and co-founder, Gauri Agarwal, 26. The founders assert that Koyal.AI represents the fastest and most effective method to transform audio into cinematic video, complete with consistent characters, settings, and storylines.

Koyal.AI is designed for a diverse range of creators who possess substantial audio content, including musicians, podcasters, and storytellers. It enables users to convert music into music videos, podcasts into TV shows, or bedtime stories into animated films. The platform leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate custom characters and animations rapidly, offering extensive creative control to its users. Creators can personalize avatars, modify scenery, makeup, and costumes, and even adjust the tone and mood of dialogue. Mehul illustrated this capability by explaining how Koyal could, for instance, set a scene from the “Barbie” movie in a castle in Northern Ireland or craft a bespoke music video featuring a choreographed flash mob. This suite of tools is designed to bring a user’s imagination to life in minutes.

The platform, hailed as a next-generation GenAI audio-to-video storytelling solution, made its public debut at the World Audio Visual and Entertainment Summit (WAVES) 2025 in Mumbai earlier this year in May. During the inaugural day, Koyal.AI demonstrated its capabilities through a series of music videos. Mehul highlighted that the unique platform generates personalized narrative-driven videos from audio in various engaging styles, utilizing state-of-the-art AI models to extract emotions, context, and storytelling elements directly from music.

Before its public beta release, Koyal.AI collaborated with esteemed music maestro AR Rahman and renowned playback singer and composer Shankar Mahadevan, among others, to support video creation for the Waves Album. The project also featured artists such as Ricky Kej and Meet Brothers. The founders emphasized that Koyal.AI’s multimodal AI suite and advanced character consistency are setting new industry benchmarks for how artists and creators visualize their work. Furthermore, Koyal has conducted seven paid pilots with major Indian music labels, podcasts, and storytelling companies, and recently concluded pilots with Universal Music, T-Series, and Bollywood production houses like Maddock Entertainment and Collective Artists Network.

The technological foundation of Koyal.AI is rooted in a research paper presented at the NeurIPS 2024 AI conference and its patented secure personalization protocol, CHARCHA. Gauri explained that CHARCHA ensures video personalization occurs only with user consent. NeurIPS, the annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, held its 38th iteration in Vancouver, Canada, in December 2024. CHARCHA, which stands for Computer Human Assessment for Recreating Characters with Human Actions, provides users with the option to create a personalized avatar using their likeness through verification steps or to opt for generated models, prioritizing consent as a safeguard.

Both Mehul and Gauri are computer science graduates. Mehul completed his master’s degree at CMU’s Robotics Institute in 2024, while Gauri earned her bachelor’s degree in computer science from CMU in 2020 before continuing her studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Gauri also spent three years working at Meta (then Facebook) in the Instagram reel generation section before co-founding Koyal.AI. During their time at CMU, the Agarwal siblings connected with Jean Oh, an associate research professor in the Robotics Institute, and Michael Hilton, a teaching professor in the Software and Societal Systems Department, who collaboratively contributed to Koyal’s development, as confirmed by a CMU statement. The Agarwal siblings are currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.

With its transition from enterprise-focused work to a public platform, Koyal.AI aims to democratize opportunities for a wide spectrum of creators, moving beyond those who can afford large-scale productions. Gauri stated that while AI is advancing rapidly, Koyal.AI offers a secure means to explore its potential. Mehul happily anticipates using the platform to make a movie out of his own stand-up jokes, truly embodying the platform’s mission to make sophisticated video creation accessible to all.