This AI streaming platform wants to challenge Netflix and YouTube, and already has 100 million organic views

“People spend over 20 minutes on average deciding what to watch, and often just closing TV or resorting to YouTube… an overwhelming majority of these users are looking for new and relatable content,” Harshit Yadav, founder of Zingroll, says while having a conversation with Financial Express.

For decades, the promise of streaming platforms has been simple – everything you want, whenever you want it. In reality, however, it has trickled down into something much more frustrating – endless scrolling.

Having suffered through that problem himself, he’s now trying to find a fix with his platform.

Zingroll – a new streaming platform that’s trending among Gen Z, is now betting that it could be the next Netflix that will be born from AI, not Hollywood, by turning every niche taste into its own always-on channel for fresh and cinematic stories.

Instead of a few blockbuster launches a month, Yadav argues that each taste group – romance, horror, mythology, and beyond – now expects new shows every few days. That’s something the traditional platforms cannot keep up with, especially when it involves the human-based production cycles and massive budgets. The content quality also takes a hit as a result.

This is the gap that Harshit Yadav wants Zingroll to exploit.

Meet the founder before we dive into what Zingroll is all about

Harshit already has experience with AI-based platforms in the past, where, before his Zingroll chapter, he was taking care of LitFeed – an AI video app that let users feature themselves and friends in AI-generated memes and skits. LitFeed gained traction across Bay Area schools and eventually evolved into what we know today as Zingroll.

Yadav’s background in the field of technology is rich – he has worked as a technology consultant at EY and built several consumer products, including Airfeed – an anonymous social app that reached thousands of daily active users across the Ivy League. He also had experience with Alienstorms, a real-time interface for public webcams. Being a Dartmouth College graduate with a double major in Computer Science and Sociology, who also led the university’s Mixed Reality initiatives, and is noted as a Z Fellow and Thiel Fellow finalist, it becomes clear as to why the idea behind Zingroll may have a ‘zingy’ future.

What is Zingroll, and how does it differ from Netflix?

You can think of Zingroll as a new streaming platform that is free to watch, but one that uses AI at its heart. This streaming platform is dedicated entirely to long-form movies and shows generated with cutting-edge AI models – no need to involve human-based production crews.

Zingroll bets big on AI cinema

Can Zingroll encourage AI cinema to become mainstream? Harshit is unapologetically bullish.

He believes that “90%+ of all movies consumed in the future will be made using AI anyway,” and that the debate around “so-called AI slop” is increasingly detached from how people actually watch. Yadav says that “there’s a small but loud minority of people who call things ‘AI Slop’, but even they’re lately failing to distinguish AI vs non-AI content. The average consumer doesn’t care for anything beyond content quality, and not how it’s made.”

Early signs on social media appear to support that thesis, with Zingroll’s trailers crossing 150 million organic views. Under the hood, Zingroll is also experimenting with more personalised formats, with one of them being “Zingroll Specials” – users can generate full-length AI shows that feature their own face, voice, and personality in anime-style productions.

Technology and entertainment go hand-in-hand

Harshit positions Zingroll in a longer history of entertainment technology. “Hollywood & Bollywood exist because of technology—if it weren’t for cameras, there would be far fewer movies and actors, who would be dancing on a Broadway stage,” he says.

Each wave, from sound to colour to digital VFX, has expanded the market instead of shrinking it. He expects AI to follow the same pattern, creating more stories, more niches, and more kinds of creators, rather than eliminating them.

At the same time, he is also realistic about the pushback. “Consumer startups have generally been dead. The last major consumer app before ChatGPT was TikTok… It is incredibly hard to build and capture new consumer habits, but now’s one of those rare moments—and this time the disruption is around Hollywood / Bollywood,” he wonders.

In such moments, Yadav predicts incumbents will “file lawsuits, strong-arm new startups or overly-protect IP—but what consumers want will end up winning anyway, as it always has, historically.” For Zingroll, that means staying strictly aligned with what audiences actually click, binge and share, even as the legal and creative landscape shifts.

What’s next for Zingroll

Zingroll’s ambition to establish an AI-centric streaming content has attracted serious early-stage support. The company is backed by A16Z Speedrun, Google’s AI Futures Fund, and Accel. Zingroll recently hit the headlines for becoming a part of the Atoms AI Cohort 2026, an achievement that could help take the company a leap into the future.

Yadav’s team, now consisting of 27 people, is split between New Delhi and San Francisco, combining deep AI expertise with storytelling and product design. This dual-location presence lets the startup sit inside both the Silicon Valley ecosystem and India’s exploding content and creator economy.

Yadav also shared the timeline he’s working toward. “In three months from now, Zingroll will start releasing mainstream hits—as model quality crosses cinematic thresholds. 2026 will be the year when mainstream cinema changes forever, and hopefully Zingroll will lead that change globally.”