“Ask a human” AI startup GVTLabs comes out of stealth

Team behind the original retweet button, DataSift and InfoSum opens the waitlist for AskGVT, where every answer comes from a real person, with the video clip to prove it

LONDON and LOS ANGELES, Thursday, October 1, 2026: GVTLabs, founded by serial data entrepreneur Nick Halstead, today came out of stealth and opened the waitlist for AskGVT: a new way to get answers from people with real experience, straight from the moment they said it on video.

AI chatbots have made answers instant, but not personal. They summarize the average of what’s been written online, with no way to see who said it or check whether they know what they’re talking about. Meanwhile, millions of creators and experts have already explained things on camera, from the exact moment caramel is about to crystallize to what the engine of a ten-year-old Ford Explorer should sound like. Those answers exist, but nobody can find the moment they said it.

AskGVT uses AI to do the finding and people to do the answering. Ask a question and you get the answer from a real person, with the exact moment they said it, timestamped and linked to the full video.

Turning video into a queryable layer

Text has been searchable for decades. Social data became queryable in the 2010s, in part thanks to DataSift, which Nick Halstead founded. Video is the biggest type of data that still can’t be queried. You can search for a video by its title or tags, but not for what happens inside it.

• It plans, not just searches. AskGVT is a video-native agentic harness: it breaks a question down, works through a creator’s whole video library, and reasons over what it finds. It can then turn the results into clips, shareable assets, datasets or actions in other tools.
• A whole library, not one video. Most AI video models only look at the video you give them. AskGVT indexes billions of frames across millions of videos and answers across all of them in a single question.
• It watches, not just reads. Most video tools read titles, tags and transcripts. AskGVT watches every second, from speech and frames to motion, narrative and audio, and understands what really happened.
• Every answer is a real moment. Each answer links to a playable clip with its source, timestamp and creator. The footage is always real. Nothing is synthesized.

Every answer can be traced back to its source. Creators control which videos are available to ask, and no content is ever scraped.

Two products for creators, opening in October

• AskPage gives every creator a public page where fans can ask their entire video library anything. Every answer is a clip from the creator’s own videos, with a link back to the original on their channel. Creators choose what’s included, can switch any source off at any time, and can keep their page free or charge fans for access with day, week or monthly passes. With no algorithm between them and their fans, creators get unique insight into what fans are asking.
• Studio is the creator’s private video workshop. Creators and their teams can ask their own videos anything to plan what to make next, find clips, and see which hooks and patterns work best. Each answer can become a deck, a report or a one-pager, and clips can be collected and shared as Boards.

The team

Nick Halstead is joined by Zuzanna Wilson as co-founder and CMO. A marketing veteran of tech startups including Huddle and DataSift, Zuzanna is also a creator herself. She has run Girls Who Can’t Surf Good, the world’s largest community of beginner surfers, for ten years.

GVTLabs was built international from day one, with a team of 20 across the US and UK.

Quotes

Nick Halstead, founder and CEO, GVTLabs: “Video is the biggest source of human knowledge we’ve ever had, and until now you couldn’t ask it a question. I had years of my own racing footage and couldn’t find the one moment I needed. Nobody could, because you can search for a video, but not inside it. That’s what we’ve built: ask a question, and AskGVT finds the exact moment someone answered it, across everything they’ve ever filmed. Wouldn’t you rather get an answer from a human than from AI?”

Zuzanna Wilson, co-founder and CMO, GVTLabs: “People like hearing answers from other people. I’ve seen it in ten years of running Girls Who Can’t Surf Good: the same questions come up again and again, even when the answer’s already out there. People don’t want to dig for it. They want lived experience, not a summary or a ranked list, and they do want to see it. AskGVT gives them that, at scale.”

Availability

AskPage and Studio open to creators in October 2026. The waitlist is open now at askgvt.com.