Steven Ilous

Steven Ilous is an American entrepreneur, filmmaker and inventor, and the founder and CEO of Feature®, an entertainment technology company in Los Angeles. At Feature he created Smart Content™: video that recognizes genuine attention and rewards it, for brands including Mobil 1, Porsche and Netflix. Feature is venture-backed, represented by WME, and an ACME Collider on the Lot Accelerator participant.

Before Feature he spent more than twenty years in film. He started at Stan Lee Media, was on the motion-capture team for the Matrix sequels, then a senior technical animator at Sony Pictures Imageworks on The Polar Express, and co-developed the FacePro facial-capture system. He developed projects for DreamWorks Animation and Warner Bros. Animation, wrote for Starz, co-created The Life and Times of Jimmy Jaxx for 20th Century Fox Television, and directed Polis, which won New Regency and Defy Media’s PROTOTYPE competition in 2015, and Lollipop Racing: Episode Zero, a 2026 International Motor Film Awards nominee.

He invests in AI and video-game companies and advises startups at the intersection of generative AI and intellectual property rights. Classically trained on piano from age four, he later studied jazz theory. A lifelong photographer, he is completing a series from Myanmar and another from a fourteen-day expedition to Antarctica.