INVIDEO

Sanket Shah got the bug back in 2012, making book-summary videos while studying at the University of Michigan. He teamed up with Pankit Chheda and Harsh Vakharia, friends he had worked with before on a restaurant marketing tool.

They launched InVideo in 2017. The first version was built for businesses, especially news publishers, who needed to turn written articles into videos fast.

It worked with outlets in India. But the real shift came around 2019, when the team pivoted to regular creators instead of big companies.

They joined Sequoia's Surge program, raised money, and started growing.

InVideo is free to try and you pay to do real work. The free plan watermarks your videos and limits how many AI clips you can make each week.

Paid plans, running from roughly $25 to $60 a month, drop the watermark and hand you more video minutes and AI credits. Heavy users buy top-ups when they run out.

The clever part is what is under the hood. InVideo bundles big AI models like OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo into one subscription, so you do not have to pay for each separately.

The headline product is InVideo AI, a tool that turns a text prompt, a script, or even a web link into a complete video. It writes the script, picks the footage, adds an AI voiceover, and lays in captions and music.

You refine it by typing instructions like a director talking to an editor. There is also InVideo Studio, a more traditional drag-and-drop editor with thousands of templates.

The platform handles voiceovers and subtitles in over 50 languages, plus voice cloning and translation.

The whole company turned on one decision in August 2023. InVideo had been a steady but unremarkable video editor.

Then it launched InVideo AI, where you type a prompt in plain English and get back a finished video, complete with AI voiceover, stock footage, music, and captions. You can even edit it by telling the AI what to change.

Growth exploded. Revenue went from around $7 million to roughly $30 million, and the company reported tens of thousands of daily signups.

The pivot to text-to-video is the entire growth story.

InVideo's biggest strength is also its biggest risk. It does not build its own AI models.

It rents them, bundling Sora, Veo, and others into its product. That is great for users but dangerous for the company.

If those model makers raise prices or launch their own consumer apps, InVideo is exposed. It also lacks AI avatars, a feature rivals like Synthesia and HeyGen built their whole businesses on.

And the first draft an AI spits out still needs human cleanup. Competition is fierce, from Pictory and Runway to Canva.

InVideo is a Sequoia story. Sequoia's Surge accelerator put in a $2.5 million seed in 2020.

Sequoia Capital India, now called Peak XV, then led a $15 million Series A later that year and took a board seat. A $35 million Series B followed in 2021, with Tiger Global, Peak XV, and Greenoaks all involved.

Hummingbird Ventures and RTP Global are also backers. All in, InVideo has raised about $52.5 million.