Flipping screen time from passive to active

Pranit Agrawal is the co-founder and CTO of Pixley AI, a platform where families create animated stories together — kids design the characters, parents shape the storylines, and Pixley animates a personalized episode in minutes. He and his co-founder Krish Iyengar, both 19-year-old college dropouts, built the company through Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch. We talked about why passive screen time is the real problem, what it takes to win over kids and parents at the same time, and how they're turning the same AI powering Pixley into a full creative studio.

What is Pixley AI, and what made you want to build it?

Pixley AI is a platform where families create animated stories together. Kids create characters, parents shape the storylines, and Pixley animates their personalized story in minutes. Parents come to Pixley as an active alternative to the passive, algorithm-driven content their kids are watching. We ended up getting into Y Combinator for their Fall 2025 batch, and since then we've been building Pixley full time.

Walk us through the core product. What does the experience feel like on the kid and parent side?

The whole platform is built to feel collaborative, not consumed. On the kid's side, as soon as they get on the platform, they can create characters from their own drawings or upload pictures of their stuffed animals — and within minutes, they have an entire animated cartoon starring the character they made. On the parent's side, it's peace of mind. Gone are the days of endless scrolling and mindless content, because every episode on Pixley is filtered and built around Social-Emotional Learning. On top of that, parents get to choose what their child learns. They can enter any lesson they want to teach — sharing, being kind, table manners — and the episode will be built around that moral.

You also built Pixley Studios. Tell us about that side of the product and how it fits into the bigger vision.

We recently launched our second platform, Pixley Studios — an agentic creative tool built on the same AI video technology that powers Pixley. Studios lets content creators, marketing teams, and CPG brands storyboard, direct, and deeply customize AI video up to 10 minutes long. AI video tooling is scattered right now. We want to consolidate it — make it accessible, easy to work with, and become the first all-in-one AI-native video generator and editor.

The bigger vision is for Pixley to be the leading player in AI video entertainment. The main platform gets us into kids' entertainment, and Studios gets us in with filmmakers, content creators, and brands.

You're both college dropouts who went through Y Combinator. What was the YC experience like, and how difficult was it to make that leap?

Honestly, the leap wasn't as hard as it sounds. Krish and I grew up building random startup ideas together — we won four college hackathons at 14, had three failed startups before this, and were constantly bouncing new ideas off each other. So when we found a real gap in the market and got into YC, it was a no-brainer.

That said, YC itself was one of the hardest experiences of my life. Going from internships and school to running a company full-time with no real industry experience was a complete 180. But it was worth it — everyone we met was insanely smart and fun to talk to, we found our biggest mentors there, and we walked out with the resources and network we needed to actually pull Pixley off.

Building for kids and parents is difficult — you have to win over two audiences at once. What does traction actually look like for Pixley?

It's a hard problem, but we've been intentional about it from the start. For parents, it comes down to trust — they need to know their kid is watching something safe, educational, and actually worth the screen time. For kids, it's simpler: it has to be fun. Pixley does both. Tight content guardrails and clear learning outcomes pull in parents; full creative control and the ability to build their own worlds pulls in kids.

As of April 2026, over 10,000 families have used Pixley to create their own content, and six companies are actively using Pixley Studios to make professional content.

What are you most excited about right now?

The most obvious one is AI video itself — the models are getting better every month, and what felt impossible six months ago is shipping in production today. We're building on a wave that's still accelerating, which is a wild place to be as a founder.

Second, we just launched our memory layer, the engine that powers personalization across Pixley. The platform now remembers every character a kid has created, every story they've made, and what they're into, so the next episode is built around them instead of pulled from a generic template. Every kid ends up with their own show, and it gets sharper the more they use it.

Bigger picture, I'm most excited about flipping screen time from passive to active. There's no reason a kid watching a cartoon can't also be reading along, talking to their characters, or picking up real skills through the stories they're already loving.

Walk us through your fundraising journey.

We raised our pre-seed through YC. After Demo Day, we raised a bit more to extend runway and have been operating on that cash ever since. We're planning to raise our seed round this fall. Staying on top of an investor pipeline is harder than it looks. Between meetings, emails to send and reply to, and tracking where each investor is in the process, it gets hectic fast. Luckily, YC gave us great internal software to manage all of it. I can definitely see how much harder this already-stressful process would've been without a solid foundation to run it on.