OPUS CLIP

Young Zhao, Grace Wang, and Jay Wu started the company in January 2022 in Palo Alto. Zhao had run a talent agency before this, so he understood creators and the grind of producing content.

The team saw the same pain everywhere. Long-form video was exploding, but short clips were what actually went viral.

Creators were stuck manually scrubbing through hours of footage to find the good bits. So they built AI to do the scrubbing and the cutting automatically.

Opus Clip is a subscription tool. Creators, agencies, and marketers pay a monthly fee.

They upload a long video. The AI watches it, picks the most engaging moments, cuts them into short vertical clips, and adds animated captions.

Free users get limited credits. Paying users get more.

That is the whole loop. Upload long, get short, post everywhere.

The flagship is the long-to-short clipping tool. Drop in a podcast or webinar and get ready-to-post vertical clips with captions and a virality score.

ClipAnything lets you search a video by describing a scene, like find every time someone laughs. There is also auto-reframing that keeps the speaker centered, and a brand template tool for agencies running many accounts.

Growth came from the creators themselves. Every clip Opus Clip exported could carry a small watermark, so the tool advertised itself across millions of social posts.

The free tier got people hooked fast. By 2024 the company had passed 6 million users and hit eight-figure annual revenue.

It also kept shipping new features like ClipAnything, which lets users find any moment in a video by describing it in plain words.

The moat is thin. Turning long video into short clips is a feature, and big platforms can copy a feature.

YouTube, TikTok, and Adobe all want a piece of the same workflow. Pictory, Captions, and a dozen other AI tools are circling the same creators.

Opus Clip has to keep out-shipping much larger companies or it gets absorbed. Raising from SoftBank buys time, but it does not buy a permanent edge.

Millennium New Horizons led the round that brought Opus Clip to $30 million in total funding. DCM Ventures, Samsung Next, GTMfund, AI Grant, Alumni Ventures, Fellows Fund, and Alpine VC joined, along with angel investor Jason Lemkin.

Then SoftBank Vision Fund 2 wrote a $20 million check at a $215 million valuation, pushing total funding to roughly $50 million. SoftBank backing a clipping tool tells you how big the bet on creator AI has gotten.