OPUS CLIP

Young Zhao, Grace Wang and Jay Wu started the company in 2022 in Palo Alto. Zhao and Wang had run a social media talent agency of around 500 people, and Wang had worked on user growth at ByteDance, so they understood the creator grind first-hand.

The team saw the same pain everywhere. Long-form video was exploding, but short clips were what actually went viral, and 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. Wu runs the technology as CTO.

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. Free-tier clips carried a small watermark, so the tool advertised itself across millions of social posts.

The free tier got people hooked fast. By early 2025 the company said more than 10 million creators had used it, producing over 172 million clips in a year that racked up about 57 billion views.

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

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 Series A that, announced in August 2024, brought OpusClip 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.

In March 2025 SoftBank Vision Fund 2 put in $20 million at a $215 million valuation, taking total funding to about $50 million. SoftBank backing a clipping tool tells you how big the bet on creator AI has gotten.