EloElo's founder on the $80M raise NBCUniversal co-led: AI is the engine, the showrunner still drives
NBCUniversal co-led an $80M round in the Indian microdrama company EloElo, whose founder says AI replaced sets and location costs, not actors or crews. Its period series The Bose Network built 1940s Berlin with AI around a real cast and crew.
AI is the engine. The person at the wheel is still a maker. That is how Saurabh Pandey describes EloElo, the Indian microdrama company behind the Story TV app, on the day it raised $80 million in a Series C co-led by Hornbill Capital and NBCUniversal.
He told TechCrunch that AI is "a really fast race car where AI is the engine, but you need an extremely capable Formula One driver to be on the steering wheel. That, for me, is the creative director or the showrunner." To Mint he was blunter: "AI has not really replaced a great quality actor or a crew. AI has replaced VFX and location costs in that sense."
His proof case is The Bose Network, with Joy Sengupta as Subhas Chandra Bose. It was written and directed by Lalit Marathe and shot by Sudip Sengupta, and Story TV says the 1940s settings, from Calcutta to Kabul to wartime Berlin, were built with AI in post-production around that real cast. Marathe says the AI tools let them recreate the 1940s across four countries "in a way that would have been almost impossible to achieve at this scale."
That is what AI makes cheap here: the world, not the people in it. EloElo says it releases about 250 microdramas a month, each well under $25,000, through around 90 production houses, and the new money goes to more original shows in Tamil, Telugu and Hindi. Each one still needs writers, directors, actors and crews who can make an AI-built world feel real.
One caveat: EloElo's own Dolphin AI app still promises "No script writers, no film crew." Its studio runs on both.
Our take: AI builds the world, people carry the show. That hybrid craft is what NBCUniversal's money now backs.
Source: TechCrunch, Mint, Variety, Nov 4, 2026.
Read the full article: thegenerated.com/stories/eloelo-nbcuniversal-80m-microdrama-20261104
