Evolo wants to bring choose-your-own-adventure AI marketing to banking and insurance

When the Black Mirror-based choose-your-own-adventure movie Bandersnatch came out in 2018, it couldn’t have been generated with artificial intelligence. It’s a different world in 2025.

With generative AI models trained on image and video data, it has become easy to develop convincing video content based on text prompts.

With that in mind, Toronto-based startup Evolo is trying to bring the flexibility of AI video to marketing teams in highly regulated sectors like financial services, insurance, and telecommunications. According to founder and CEO Vahid Mirjalili, AI has allowed Evolo to develop an AI software suite that generates short-form videos customers can interact with when shopping for complex products like mortgages and life insurance plans.

Evolo raised $3 million USD ($4.1 million CAD) for this vision through a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) at the end of December. United States-based (US) early-stage FinTech VC Portage led the round, with participation from Toronto-based Golden Ventures and angel investors.

Mirjalili claimed the company’s TikTok-style videos, which sometimes feature human avatars with real voices, allow customers to explore at their own pace and reduce the educational work for salespeople.

“People’s attention spans are declining,” Mirjalili said in an interview with BetaKit.

According to research from the University of California, Irvine, average adult attention spans have dropped from two-and-a-half minutes in 2003 to less than 60 seconds in 2023. The rapid rise of short-form video content, including TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, has fuelled consumer familiarity and, in some cases, addiction in students.

Evolo sells its suite of AI video tools to large businesses, which then can implement the tech as a bridge between finding marketing leads and making sales. This way, a customer can click through a webpage about mortgage products, ask questions along the way, and get answers without talking to a human.

“It enables sales [teams] to do what they’re great at, which is selling and closing deals,” Mirjalili said.

Evolo automates video content creation, sometimes with real salespeople who consent to having their likenesses used (customers are informed that videos are AI-generated). But these AI videos can only respond to customers from a set of approved clips—like a pick-your-path decision tree.

Mirjalili said the goal is for clients to pre-approve all video content generated by AI ahead of rolling it out to customers, ideally avoiding the type of hallucinations that arise in consumer chatbots. The advantage of using generative AI, Mirjalili said, is that companies can update their educational materials far more cheaply and efficiently than they would by casting and filming videos with real people.

This isn’t Mirjalili’s first foray into enterprise software solutions for regulated sectors. He co-founded Owl.co, which develops AI solutions for banking and insurance data management and has raised more than $40 million. He left the startup in January 2024.

Mirjalili said the heart of this new venture is making industries that can be frustrating to deal with—like telecom or banking—more customer-centric. He claimed that Evolo has secured large customers in regulated industries in Canada, but declined to say which ones. Customer pilots, he added, have shown a 30-to-50 percent increase in customer engagement and higher conversion rates.

Stephanie Choo, general partner at Portage, told BetaKit that Evolo stands out because of its enterprise readiness. “It’s rare to see a startup that can deliver fast [return on investment] and still meet the compliance, security, and workflow needs of large, regulated institutions,” she wrote in an email.

Evolo plans to expand internationally after gaining a foothold in North America. The startup is using the funding for product development and “hiring top talent,” Mirjalili said. The team currently consists of seven full-time employees and seven part-time workers.

“The main goal is building a billion-dollar company in a very efficient way,” he said.

Feature image courtesy TechTO via YouTube.