About Genvid

Create with AI. Own Every Frame.

Genvid is a New York-based media technology company building studio-grade production infrastructure for the generative AI era. We bridge the gap between high-end content production and the emerging technologies that redefine storytelling. That combination has defined every chapter of our history.

Where We Started

Founded in 2016 by veterans of the gaming industry, Genvid was built on the conviction that the relationship between audiences and narratives was due for a fundamental shift. Our name reflects this: Gen (from the Latin for birth) and Vid (viewing): the inception of a new era in interactive experiences.

CEO and co-founder Jacob Navok previously led worldwide business development and strategy at Square Enix Holdings. There, he built the company’s cloud gaming division, Shinra Technologies, assembling the core team that would eventually found Genvid. The question that drove our early work remains our north star: What does professional-grade infrastructure look like for the next generation of media?

The first answer was interactive streaming.

The Interactive Streaming Era: Proven at Scale

Genvid pioneered the Massively Interactive Live Event (MILE): a category-defining format merging the scale of broadcast television with the participatory mechanics of gaming. This wasn’t a simple feature layer; it required a ground-up build of a patented interactive streaming engine and an entirely new production discipline. The results established Genvid as the global leader in interactive narrative:

Rival Peak: Our inaugural MILE production ran on Facebook for three months, generating over 200 million engagements and proving that global audiences would engage deeply with real-time narrative influence.
PAC-MAN Community: Developed in partnership with Bandai Namco, bringing an iconic gaming staple into the interactive streaming era.
The Walking Dead: Last Mile: Produced with Skybound Entertainment, this series drew over 50 million viewers across its weekly live streams and won the 2023 Webby Award for Best Audience Integration.
SILENT HILL: Ascension: Produced with Konami, this project set new benchmarks for interactive horror, winning a second Webby and earning Genvid the Emmy® Award for Outstanding Innovation in Emerging Media.
DC Heroes United: Produced with Warner Bros. Discovery, further expanding the boundaries of fan-driven storytelling within the DC Multiverse.

Across this body of work, Genvid has secured three Webby Awards (including Best Features and Community in 2024) alongside our Emmy®, making us one of the most recognized studios in the emerging interactive entertainment category.

The Shift to Professional Production

The capabilities we honed in interactive streaming: production management at scale and asset tracking across complex, multi-contributor pipelines: are precisely what the professional generative production landscape currently lacks.

As generative tools matured, studios encountered a “production gap”: a total absence of version control, budget visibility, asset continuity, and provenance. While generation tools have advanced rapidly, the production layer remained non-existent.

Genvid built that layer: our platform is not a generation tool with project management “tacked on”; it is a robust production management infrastructure with native generation capabilities. We provide the control necessary to turn technical experiments into studio-ready workflows.

The Leadership Team

Our team combines deep roots in game development, media technology, and enterprise platform engineering : a rare combination that shaped both the interactive streaming era the company pioneered and the professional AI production platform it’s building today.

Jacob Navok, CEO and Co-Founder, has led Genvid since founding. His background spans worldwide business development and strategy at Square Enix Holdings, cloud gaming infrastructure at Shinra Technologies, and nearly a decade building a company at the frontier of interactive media.

Christopher Cataldi, COO and Co-Founder, has been with Genvid since day one. His background spans R&D management and technology marketing strategy consulting for major Japanese technology companies, business development at Shinra Technologies, and earlier roles at Mitsubishi Corporation.

Fabien Ninoles, CTO and Co-Founder, built the technical foundation of Genvid’s interactive streaming era. His background spans game programming at Eidos Montreal and Ubisoft, technology leadership at Shinra Technologies, and the engineering of the patented interactive streaming engine that made Massively Interactive Live Events possible at scale.

Jerry Heinz, CIO, is the primary architect of Genvid’s AI video production platform. His background spans platform engineering at Amazon and Nvidia, CTO leadership at AI cybersecurity firm ActZero, and the design of the provenance architecture and agentic workflow engine that define Genvid’s production infrastructure today.

The Seeker

In December 2025, Genvid Chief Creative Officer Stephan Bugaj commercially released The Seeker, a feature-length philosophical science fiction film created entirely using generative AI for all visuals, music, and nearly all voice performance. It’s the first commercially released generative AI film, the first such film made by an Emmy Award winner, and the first produced under a studio-grade AI production workflow with complete provenance and audit-ready records for every generated asset.

The Seeker was a real production, not a proof of concept. It was produced for under $2,000 in AI usage credits, took a fraction of the iterations typical of comparable AI short films, and is commercially available on Vimeo with Amazon and iTunes distribution forthcoming.

Stephan brought to Genvid more than thirty years of creative and technical leadership: twelve years at Pixar across the creative and technical sides of productions including The Incredibles, Wall-E, Ratatouille, and Brave; creative direction at Telltale Games on Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and Tales from the Borderlands; and the CCO role at DJ2 Entertainment behind the Sonic the Hedgehog films and the Tomb Raider Netflix adaptation.

The Seeker is the clearest demonstration of what Genvid’s platform makes possible. It’s also a direct argument for what we believe about the future of production.

What We Believe

The shift from traditional production to generative AI production is structural, not gradual – comparable to the arrival of CGI in the late 1980s. The studios and filmmakers who built fluency with those tools early became Pixar. The ones who waited found themselves behind a gap that never fully closed.

Generative AI is not going to eliminate creative jobs in film, television, and games. Directing, writing, and producing are not going to disappear, but they will be amplified and changed by generative AI tools. Those tools will need infrastructure built to professional standards to be usable at production scale.

Genvid is building that infrastructure. We believe that when a production owns its complete chain of custody, from first generation to final delivery, it owns every frame. That is what studio-grade production means in the generative AI era, and it’s what we are here to build.

To learn more about Genvid or talk to our team, visit genvid.com or reach us at [email protected].