Building the backbone of the creator ecosystem — announcing our investment in Kapwing!

It’s literally this easy to get started creating content on Kapwing!

The rise of online video over the last ten years has been staggering. The average American spends almost 80 minutes each day watching video on a device other than TV, and the most sought-after career for U.S. 8-to-12 year-olds is “vlogger/YouTuber.” As of 2017, more than 17 million Americans made money from online content creation.

Unsurprisingly, video has also become a crucial means of communication and storytelling for businesses. Almost 90% of business marketers now use online video, often in ways that are much more creative and exciting than the traditional ad. We’ve all seen the power of a viral video (DollarShaveClub’s famous effort has 26 million views on YouTube), but many businesses are now using video for more everyday tasks. A few of our favorite examples, from businesses small and large:

• LEGO’s behind-the-scenes tour on LinkedIn of their Denmark factory, which makes 5 million bricks per hour (!)
• Spas, nail salons, and hair salons are using videos on Yelp to give a more dynamic look at their “after” product
• Squarespace’s series of beautiful videos with creators on how they make content (check out this one with Jeff Bridges on his album Sleeping Tapes)
• Embark Vet (23AndMe for dogs) uses video to show how they reunite dog siblings through their “relative finder” feature

Almost every business, regardless of size, should be using online video. Unfortunately, making video can be a huge time suck, particularly if you’re not an expert. Legacy video creation tools like iMovie and Adobe Premiere Pro require you to download their software and study up on their features — you have to read articles and watch videos (or even take classes!) to decode their complicated functionality. They’re also notoriously laggy and super slow to import or export content.

Adobe Premiere Pro and iMovie can be extremely frustrating to use — these are just a few representative posts expressing creator sentiment towards these tools.

It’s 2019, and companies like Google (with G Suite), Canva, Figma, and Airtable have changed the way we think about creating content. They’ve also raised the bar for what users expect from their media software — fast, easy to onboard, collaborative, and intuitive. Where is this solution for video?

Enter Kapwing. Kapwing is a cloud-based editing suite for video and other dynamic forms of media that are hard to edit online, like GIFs, audio, and more. Kapwing works on every OS, is free, and requires no install or login. In two seconds, creators can get started editing content in Kapwing’s powerful Studio or in one of the company’s many standalone tools for tasks like auto-subtitling (see GIF below), watermarking, and embedding text. Users can also publish and export or share content directly from a Kapwing link in seconds. And with content saved in the Kapwing workspace, it’s easy to go back and re-edit.

Video subtitles are hugely important for marketing videos on social, but are a huge pain to create on Adobe and iMovie — creators have individually type out and set the duration of every caption, and then edit them individually, which takes hundreds of keystrokes and potentially hours of time. Kapwing uses AI to auto-subtitle videos, and makes it super easy to edit text or change the appearance of every caption at once — you can subtitle a whole video in seconds with one click!

You’ve likely already come across Kapwing-generated content, which is used by almost 1 million creators on a monthly basis — from Fortune 500 marketers to influencers to elementary school students. You may have also seen Kapwing’s meme generator, cartoon-creation tool, and content collections (Trendy404s, Museum of Websites, and Startup Demo Videos, among others!) that have topped the charts on ProductHunt. Kapwing’s team members are prolific content creators themselves!

Kapwing’s product is a 10x better solution in the media editing space, with an amazing team making it work behind the scenes. Co-founders Julia Enthoven and Eric Lu met at Google, where they worked on creating intuitive and consumer-friendly products like image and identity. Even at Google, they struggled to easily make and edit video, and found themselves wasting time trying to learn to use complex software (or turned to sketchy websites that make you enter your email to resize a video).

We’ve known Julia since 2012, when we worked together at The Stanford Daily, and reconnected with her in the early days of Kapwing. We’re beyond impressed with how she and Eric have built the Kapwing product and their team over the last few years. We couldn’t be more excited to lead their Series A, and are looking forward to seeing creators everywhere discover Kapwing!

-Saar Gur, Justine Moore, and Olivia Moore