- AI startup OpusClip has secured $20 million in funding, led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2.
- The startup uses natural language processing to simplify short-form video editing for creators.
- Here's how the startup nabbed funding from the Japanese investment giant.
Generative AI video editing startup OpusClip has just secured $20 million in a round led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2.
The San Francisco startup, launched in 2022, has developed a multimodal AI tool for publishing short videos on social media platforms.
Users can enter text prompts into OpusClip's platform to extract clips from videos. The startup's AI analyzes social media trends to pick clips that it assesses to be the most compelling for audiences. Users can then merge them together to make high-engagement videos.
OpusClip's cofounder and CEO, Young Zhao, previously ran a talent agent — an experience that honed his understanding of the creator space. "The inspiration was to democratize this tedious process through AI, so all the creators in the world would be able to access all the technologies," he told Business Insider in an interview.
Zhao added that matching video supply with a growing demand for social media content is becoming increasingly difficult.
"A lot of people found it difficult to learn editing tools to produce the content," he said. "Our goal is to remove the time and learning curve needed to produce these videos, through a few clicks."
So far, OpusClip says it's seen a lot of demand from podcasters who have to manage a lot of long-form filming and editing.
"We've also seen a lot of use cases from media companies, gamers, and sports-based videos," Zhao said. The startup currently counts Univision, Billboard, iHeartMedia, Visa, and LinkedIn among its clients.
The startup makes its money by charging a monthly subscription, which starts at $19 monthly for a starter plan and goes up to $29 for a pro plan.
"It's a subscription model, but it's also based on AI credits; you can buy however many packs of AI processing with that," he said, adding that the company has also started developing a business-to-business payment model for its enterprise customers.
The $20 million round was led by Japanese investment giant SoftBank's Vision Fund 2, which has previously backed Glean and Klarna. Existing investors include DCM Ventures, AIGrant, and Millennium New Horizons.
SoftBank has been attempting to capitalize on the AI boom, with the company in talks to lead fresh investment into OpenAI. In January, SoftBank's CEO, Masayoshi Son, said the company would participate in a $500 billion investment in US AI infrastructure.
Zhao described the fundraising process as "simple and smooth," adding that SoftBank contacted the startup in late September last year and closed the round by December. This brings the startup's total funding to $50 million.
"Social media is the largest pool where you can find videos, and we are growing so fast — 18 months after launch, we've gathered 10 million users who have created over 70 million videos on our platforms," he said. "Our product is completely AI-first, and SoftBank is fascinated by a new generation of video editing."
He added that investor appetite for multimodal AI — a type of AI model that processes various types of data, such as images, audio, and text — is also rife, with investment juggernauts eager to deploy funds in the sector. One recent example is voice cloning startup ElevenLabs raising over $200 million in Series C funding.
With the cash injection, OpusClip said it would expand its headcount and invest more in AI research in the video space.
