Capsule, a startup that’s been putting ai to use in video editing, is releasing its product to the public, after three years in development. The company’s enterprise-focused ai editor aims not to replace the humans involved in video editing, but to help content and marketing teams produce video ten times faster than before, the company claims.
To do so, Capsule addressed a number of pain points it heard from customers, including the difficulties around video editing and use of motion graphics, the demands of strict brand guidelines, and the need to collaborate on video projects. Because of these concerns, most video production is outsourced to professionals, Capsule said.
But with its product, the startup aims to offer a similar simplicity found in other productivity apps — like Notion or Slides — by offering an approachable user interface that also leverages ai to make video editing easier. Meanwhile, the video editing itself takes place in the browser, eliminating the need for a fast computer.
The company had previously demoed how users could do things like select a block of text from the video’s transcript and turn it into a title card or have the ai generate an image based on the text or something else entered into a text prompt field. It also lets users easily choose between styles of captions, among other things.
Since raising its $4.75 million round earlier this year, Capsule was rebuilt, adding dozens of new features and performance updates aimed at helping enterprises create video at scale. Users can now easily add text and motion graphics without formal editing experience, says Capsule, and can lean on ai to generate components like headlines and images for B-roll.
Plus, the team is working to develop collaboration features that would allow copywriters, product designers, motion designers, video editors, marketing teams, and anyone else involved in the project to all work together within Capsule.
Video edits themselves are powered by Capsule’s video scripting language, CapsuleScript, built over the past several years and designed to work in the browser. All of the ai model outputs are fed as inputs into CapsuleScript.
This language includes its own Layout and animation engine like CSS, has dynamic expressions and modular components like JavaScript, and supports resolution-independent motion graphics like SVG. Soon, CapsuleScript will open up to the community so designers and developers can expand its capabilities.
Capsule has been in beta testing with over 160 companies, including brands like HubSpot, Suzy, and Zapier, but is now launching into public beta. The startup already had a waitlist of 10K people who were waiting to get access.
The solution is free for individual business users who sign up with a company email, while enterprise pricing is priced per seat and is in line with other enterprise creative tools like Figma.
To date, Capsule has raised $7.75 million in funding Bloomberg Beta, Array Ventures, Human Ventures, Swift Ventures, and angels including Nat Friedman (CEO, Github), Amjad Masad (CEO, Replit), Clark Valberg (Founder, InVision), Arash Ferdowsi (CTO, Dropbox), Kyle Parrish (Head of Sales, Figma), Mike Mignano (ex-Head of Audio & Video, Spotify), Roy Ranani (Co-Founder, Chorus.ai) and Sahil Lavingia (Founder, Gumroad).