Raleigh’s Scale Social Uses AI to Help Brands Capture What Actually Happened
RALEIGH, October 13 (Hypepotamus) — What if the antidote to AI slop is an AI director?
That is the pitch behind Scale Social, a Raleigh, North Carolina-based startup building infrastructure that helps enterprise brands capture real customer experiences and turn them into permissioned, reusable marketing assets.
Led by founder and CEO Runbin Dong (in featured photo), the company helps everyday customers record their experiences, collects usage permissions at the point of capture, and organizes the resulting content in a library marketing teams can use across campaigns.
For brands, the promise extends beyond a steady stream of videos. Each program adds to a growing collection of customer stories, with the rights and context needed to put those stories to work.
Capturing Experiences Where They Happen
“Most people who are having really great experiences [with a brand] are not creators to begin with. So how do we help brands capture really genuine, authentic moments?” Dong told Hypepotamus.
Scale Social works through the touchpoints brands already use to reach customers, like email, text messages, events, apps, social media, and QR codes in physical locations. Customers access the capture experience through the web, without downloading another app.
PlayerZero is an AI production engineer that builds a living model of how your software actually works.
Its AI Director guides participants through recording, providing prompts and instructions on shots and camera angles that help them tell their own stories in a format the brand can use.
“For the everyday person, they don’t create content because they aren’t confident that they can create good content. Our technology bridges that gap, giving them confidence because they have a director in front of them,” Dong said.
The approach uses AI to make people more capable of documenting an experience they actually had.
For marketing teams, Scale Studio brings incoming assets into a central library for review, evaluation, and reuse. Permissions collected during capture help brands understand how they can deploy the content across their owned and paid channels.
That combination—guided capture, usage rights, and a reusable library—is central to the company’s positioning. Finding authentic customer content is only part of the challenge. Brands also need a dependable way to obtain it, approve it, and use it.
From Campaigns to an Ongoing Content System
Dong saw the problem firsthand while working with his mother to launch a handmade Chinese dumpling business in 2023.
His background was in healthcare and digital health, including work at Moderna (where he served as the Head of Channel Partnerships) and CVS Health. Growing a consumer food business introduced him to a different challenge: sustaining attention online.
The dumpling company hired influencers to build its digital presence. Their posts brought visibility, but the effect was short-lived.
“[Influencers] are like fireworks. Content goes out, and literally two days later you are back to normal,” Dong said.
That left the business repeatedly finding and paying new influencers. Scale Social grew out of his effort to make word-of-mouth marketing more sustainable.
The startup launched in January 2025 and began its enterprise go-to-market push in early 2026. An appearance on This Week in Startups, hosted by investor Jason Calacanis, helped introduce the company to larger brands facing similar challenges.
For enterprise customers, Scale Social’s platform and managed support provide a system that can serve multiple campaigns and brands. Assets remain available for future use, while brand feedback and performance signals help inform what content to capture next.
Maija Ehlinger
The company is also building toward a broader intelligence layer, organizing the information within customer videos so marketing teams can identify themes and retrieve relevant experiences. Its production APIs and Model Context Protocol connections already allow other systems and agents to access the repository and associated metadata.
That intelligence layer remains an evolving part of the product. The immediate commercial entry point is helping brands obtain authentic, usable content from their own customers.
A North Carolina Company Building for Enterprise Brands
As AI makes content creation easier, Dong sees an opportunity in helping companies capture and organize real human experiences.
“We use AI to help scale human capability,” he said.
Scale Social announced a $1.3 million pre-seed round in late 2025. North Carolina investors included RTP Angel Fund, Primordial Ventures, Charlotte Fund, and Triangle Tweener Fund. The company also received grant support from the NC IDEA Foundation.
Next, Dong will take the stage at Venture Atlanta 2026 as a selected early-stage company.
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