EXCLUSIVE: Gabe Hordos, an animator who has worked on movies such as How To Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda, launched his own animated short film The Old Knight on YouTube last year.

But it wasn’t until Hordos started working with A.I. company Chronicle Studios that he started to see some results.

The company, which calls itself a content intelligence platform, helped Hordos find new audiences and his channel went from around 500,000 monthly impressions to over 6M with part one of his film scoring nearly 2.7M views alone.

This has now led Hordos to strike a partnership with the company, which found the animator using its own AI-powered discovery model – its first with a YouTube creator.

Chronicle will now oversee all content optimization and monetization efforts for The Old Knight, which was written and directed by Hordos. The film itself, which follows a royal knight’s journey to redemption after his services are dismissed by his king, was produced an animated through traditional methods, without using AI.

It now wants to find more creators to work with in the animation, comedy, video games, music, brands and video podcasts spaces.

It comes after Chronicle Studios raised $11.6M in seed funding from Patron and Point72 Ventures, with participation from Z Ventures, Sands Capital and others.

“Our vision is to empower storytellers, studios and brands by using AI to find and grow a community of passionate fans, creating meaningful revenue opportunities for creator-led channels and IP,” said Chronicle Studios’ CEO and Co-Founder Aaron Sisto. “The moment we saw Gabe’s work on YouTube, we knew this was a great opportunity to team up with a gifted filmmaker. The strong early returns on The Old Knight validate our value proposition to creators and point to a promising future for Gabe and his creative vision.”

“The Old Knight has been a passion project of mine for as long as I can remember,” added Hordos. “While developing, writing and bringing animated content to life is a true joy, the task of finding viewers for your work in the digital realm is daunting. Watching Chronicle Studios’  platform grow the numbers so quickly and deliver a meaningful audience to The Old Knight is extremely exciting.”

The Old Knight stars Jay Preston, Dee Bradley Baker and Megan Ann Hensley and is exec produced by Line Korsgaard Andersen.