With Fresh Funding and New Clients, the Sunnyvale Startup Is Hiring Aggressively to Bring AI-Powered Ad Production to U.S. Brands
In the world of digital advertising, creativity has always been king, but producing it has remained laborious, expensive, and slow. Wei Xu, a Silicon Valley veteran with product leadership stints at Meta and ByteDance, believes that artificial intelligence is now ready to flip that script.
His latest venture, Leverage AI Inc., based in Sunnyvale, aims to become an automated ad content creation operating system. The company’s newly launched platform allows businesses to generate, localize, and optimize video advertisements using a fully AI-driven pipeline. And with new funding recently secured, Leverage AI is hiring aggressively to scale up operations and product capabilities.
“In the past, you needed a team of writers, editors, and motion designers to make one good video ad,” Xu said in an interview. “Now you can get 20 versions in 20 minutes, and they’re tuned to performance, not guesswork.”
New Client Win: Clapper Media
Leverage AI has also signed its first commercial contract with Clapper Media, a fast-growing player in the social media space. The deal, valued in the tens of thousands of U.S. dollars, marks the company’s first enterprise-level deployment of its AI-powered ad solution—and a significant validation of its ability to support high-scale clients.
Clapper is a short-form video app similar to TikTok, but with a unique focus on community-driven content and authentic engagement. Unlike its mainstream competitors, Clapper emphasizes building interest-based micro-communities, rather than promoting viral trends. The platform is especially popular among users aged 17 and older, offering ad-free user experiences, "Duet Live" livestreaming, and radio-style group chats for real-time interaction.
As of 2025, Clapper has surpassed 10 million monthly active users (MAU) globally—a major milestone for a social platform operating outside the traditional big-tech ecosystem. The company has been gaining momentum in North America and emerging creator economies, positioning itself as a grassroots alternative for independent voices.
“We’re excited to support a platform like Clapper, which prioritizes authentic creator voices and community-first engagement,” Xu said. “Their rapid growth shows there’s a strong appetite for platforms that respect user agency, and our AI tools help them scale content generation while preserving that mission.”
This contract signals Leverage AI’s readiness to serve sophisticated, high-volume clients with demanding creative needs and real-time content expectations. It also provides a live use case for its ad platform’s ability to handle localized, culturally sensitive content across multiple regions and languages—an increasingly critical requirement in the global digital landscape.
Addressing a Multi-Faceted Industry Bottleneck
Traditional ad production remains one of the most time-consuming and resource-heavy areas of modern marketing. Copywriting, asset sourcing, video editing, feedback loops, and localization often span several weeks, and budgets can quickly soar into five or six figures.
According to Xu, that’s not just inefficient—it’s exclusionary. “The system was built for big brands with big budgets,” he said. “We want to make world-class creatives available to any business with a web browser and an idea.”
Leverage AI’s platform removes friction at every stage of the process. Users input brand goals and basic parameters, and the system handles the rest—writing the script, sourcing visuals, applying compliance edits, and deploying A/B test-ready assets customized by audience, region, and channel.
The Platform: Automation Meets Customization
The core technology behind Leverage AI combines large language models, generative video tools, and proprietary ad performance training data. The platform delivers:
Script & Title Generation optimized for scroll-stopping engagement
Asset Sourcing using web scraping and internal media banks
Editing & Localization with face/language swapping and auto-cutting
Real-Time Performance Tracking and automatic iterative content improvement
Clients range from mobile app developers to DTC (direct-to-consumer) brands and marketing agencies. The platform offers:
SaaS Subscription Plans ($500–$5,000/month)
API Licensing for marketing platforms and tools
Enterprise Custom Campaigns, with full-service creative and strategy teams
Xu says Leverage AI aims to reduce production costs by 70% and cut delivery time from weeks to hours, without sacrificing quality or compliance.
Backed by Industry Experience—and Now, Capital
Xu’s entrepreneurial resume includes several viral consumer products. In 2022, he co-founded LiveIn, a social widget app that rose to No. 1 on the U.S. App Store within weeks of launch, reaching over 2 million daily active users and earning 300 million+ TikTok views organically.
Before that, he helped scale TikTok’s video commerce business and led Facebook’s video advertising monetization unit, overseeing more than $40 million in daily ad revenue. He holds degrees from NYU and Stanford Ignite and has published peer-reviewed research in artificial intelligence and wireless systems.
“I’ve seen how creative power can drive growth,” Xu said. “But I’ve also seen how hard it is to scale content without blowing up your budget. That’s the gap we’re closing.”
New Investment: Xirang Joins as Strategic Backer
Leverage AI also recently closed its first seed funding round, with participation from Xirang, a firm with deep research expertise in artificial intelligence. Xirang’s investment signals growing institutional confidence in AI-native platforms that directly address inefficiencies in digital media production.
“Xirang brings more than just capital—they bring technical insight and long-term thinking,” said Xu. “It’s the kind of partner we want as we scale.”
The funding will support expansion of Leverage AI’s engineering and go-to-market teams, alongside infrastructure development for advanced features like voice synthesis, multilingual personalization, and automated performance optimization.
“We’re building a foundational layer for modern marketing,” Xu said. “That means hiring the best minds in AI, design, and growth—and moving fast.”
What’s Next
Hiring is underway across product, AI research, sales, and client success roles. The company projects its first-year revenue at $500,000, with a five-year target of $50 million through a mix of subscription, API, and enterprise services.
By early 2026, Leverage AI plans to expand the platform with integrated ad deployment across TikTok, YouTube, and Meta Ads Manager. The company is also developing a creative intelligence dashboard that will allow marketers to predict performance before launch.
“Our vision isn’t just to automate ads,” Xu said. “It’s to make marketing smarter, faster, and more accessible.”
As AI continues to transform the creative industries, Xu believes the winners will be those who build tools that scale creativity, not replace it.
“Creativity is still human,” he added. “We’re just removing the bottlenecks.”
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