KAPWING

Julia Enthoven and Eric Lu met at Google in its associate product manager program. They were frustrated.

Editing video meant wrestling with iMovie or Premiere, tools that were slow to learn and built for one person working alone. In the fall of 2017 they quit and started building.

The first version of Kapwing was a bare-bones online meme maker. It ran in the browser, no download required.

People found it through Google search, made a meme, and shared it, watermark and all. That watermark quietly pulled in the next wave of users.

By mid-2018 they had raised a seed round and the company was off.

Kapwing is free to start and you pay to remove the limits. The free tier slaps a watermark on your videos, caps the length, and limits the quality.

Pay for a Pro or Business plan and the watermark disappears, you get 4K exports, longer videos, and the full set of AI tools. Plans are billed per person on a team.

The free version is the marketing. Every watermarked video sent someone new back to the site.

The core is a video editor that runs in your browser, no install, with exports up to 4K. The auto-subtitle generator transcribes a video and adds captions in dozens of styles.

There is an AI video generator that turns text or images into clips. Smart Cut automatically strips out silences and filler words.

AI dubbing translates a video into other languages. The whole thing is built for teams to edit together at the same time.

Two hacks did the heavy lifting. The first was the watermark.

Every free export carried the Kapwing name, so the product advertised itself across the internet for free. Reportedly even Kanye West and Joe Jonas shared watermarked clips.

The second was search. Kapwing built thousands of pages targeting exactly what people type into Google, like add text to video or make a meme.

That brought in millions of visitors a month without paid ads. By March 2023 users had created more than 100 million projects on the platform.

The space is brutally crowded and getting worse. CapCut, owned by TikTok's parent ByteDance, is free and massive.

Canva bolted video editing onto its giant user base. VEED and Descript are chasing the same creators.

Kapwing's answer is real-time collaboration, the ability to edit a video with your team like a Google Doc. The deeper question is whether AI video tools get so cheap and common that a small, independent player gets squeezed out by giants with far more money.

Kapwing raised a $1.7 million seed in 2018 led by Kleiner Perkins. Then CRV led an $11 million Series A in 2019.

That is roughly $12.7 million total, which is tiny for a company this widely used. Other backers include Shasta Ventures, Village Global, and ZhenFund.

Notable angel Harry Stebbings of the 20VC podcast also chipped in. Kapwing has not raised since 2019, running on its own revenue instead.