Aaron
Sisto

Chronicle Studios is in the business of finding the next great franchise before it costs $200 million to discover it exists. Aaron Sisto built the machine that does the finding. His co-founder, Chris deFaria - former president of DreamWorks Animation and producer of the Oscar-winning Gravity - built the relationships that make the franchises real. Together they are doing something Hollywood has resisted for decades: starting at the audience.

The standard studio model runs backward. Commission a property, spend years and hundreds of millions of dollars developing it, release it, and hope audiences show up. Chronicle's model inverts that entirely. Find creators who already have loyal, measurable communities on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. Use proprietary agentic AI to analyze those audiences - their composition, their engagement patterns, their franchise appetite. Then invest early, like a venture fund, and build from there into animation, games, podcasts, short-form content, and eventually feature films.

It is a deep-tech thesis wearing entertainment clothing. Sisto has spent his career building exactly that kind of product: tools that make invisible patterns visible, then actionable.

Before Chronicle, Sisto was a partner at First Spark Ventures, writing $1.5M checks into deep-tech startups. Before that, he was Director of Engineering at Schmidt Futures - Eric Schmidt's philanthropic science-and-technology initiative. Before that, he worked at In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, evaluating bets in AI, AR/VR, and quantum computing for national security applications.

The through-line in all of it: he is drawn to problems where the data is rich and the pattern recognition is hard. Quantum chemistry. Government intelligence. Early-stage venture. Now: what becomes a global franchise.

He also co-founded Searchable.ai, where he served as Chief Scientist, leading core R&D and filing multiple patents. The startup was a preview of what Chronicle would become: a technology-first approach to a problem everyone else was solving with instinct and luck.

When Chronicle Studios announced its seed round in June 2025 - $11.6M, oversubscribed, led by Patron and Point72 Ventures with Z Ventures and Sands Capital participating - the signal was clear. The investors weren't betting on Hollywood. They were betting on the technology layer underneath it.

The career makes sense in reverse. A PhD in quantum chemistry is training in finding structure in chaos - predicting the behavior of systems too complex to model analytically. That is, fundamentally, what Sisto does for a living. He just changed the system.

At In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm, he evaluated technologies that could reshape national security. At Schmidt Futures, he directed engineering investments under one of the most ambitious technology philanthropists alive. At First Spark Ventures, he wrote early checks into companies solving problems most investors hadn't noticed yet. At Chronicle Studios, he is the founder.