ChatCut: Golden Horse Award-Winning Director Transitions to AI Video Editing Tool Global Startup Founder

Origin

Founder Kaiwen Li was previously a documentary director associated with the Golden Horse Awards. Through years of professional editing work, he deeply felt that traditional editing workflows were extremely unfriendly to small-to-medium creators: concepts like timeline operations, keyframe color grading, and audio alignment felt like ancient Greek to non-professional users, shutting a massive number of short-form video bloggers and independent content creators out of the creative threshold. In 2024, amidst the AI video generation wave, he observed that existing tools were either too professional (Premiere/Resolve) or leaned heavily toward consumer-grade template stacking (CapCut templates). There was a lack of an intelligent editing layer in the middle that could be driven by natural language while retaining the creator's stylistic judgment. Thus, he decided to teach himself programming from scratch, aiming to encapsulate a professional director's editing judgment into capabilities that AI could invoke, enabling overseas small-to-medium creators to complete rough cuts, fine edits, and multi-platform adaptation with a single sentence.

Milestones

Turning Points

• Overturning the first-version professional-oriented NLE workflow logic and pivoting toward conversational AI editing; this was a crucial cognitive shift from a director's perspective to a user's perspective.
• The broadcast of the in-depth interview on the podcast 'Crossing' drove a single-day registration peak of 3,000+, making content marketing ChatCut's most effective user acquisition channel.
• In October 2025, ZhenFund led an eight-figure seed round, validating the capital market's recognition of the 'professional creator turning to AI tool globalization' path.
• The launch of the Codex plugin format extended the reach from pure SaaS to the developer ecosystem, while also sparking strategic controversy over narrowing the audience scope.

Failures & Pitfalls

• The initial product blindly copied NLE timeline logic, resulting in under 10% retention in its first week. Three months of development resources were almost entirely wasted, and the team nearly disbanded.
• The founder taught himself programming with zero experience; the development environment repeatedly threw errors during the first two months, and the first demo failed to handle multi-resolution footage, with technical bottlenecks severely delaying progress.
• Early on, it overly relied on Discord community word-of-mouth promotion without establishing a systematic user acquisition framework, causing seed user growth to stagnate at around 200 users for three consecutive weeks.
• Following the launch of the Codex plugin format, it faced criticism for having an overly narrow target audience—the low overlap between developers and content creators might limit the commercialization ceiling.

Core Data

• Seed Round Financing Amount：Tens of millions of RMB (led by ZhenFund, participated by Antler) (Public data source, independent verification not verified)
• Monthly Active Users (MAU)：160,000 (Public data source, independent verification not verified)
• Monthly Growth Rate：120% (Public data source, independent verification not verified)
• Paid Conversion Rate：13% (Public data source, independent verification not verified)
• 30-Day User Retention：38% (Public data source, independent verification not verified)
• Team Size：5 people (Public data source, independent verification not verified)
• Single-Day Registration Peak：3,000+ (After the podcast interview aired) (Public data source, independent verification not verified)

Competitors / Peers

Competition in the AI video editing track where ChatCut operates is extraordinarily fierce. Overseas, CapCut's international version leverages ByteDance's resources, occupying the down-market creator segment through template-based editing and free strategies; OpusClip specializes in automatically slicing long-form videos into shorts, having secured multiple rounds of financing to cover a massive number of podcasts and content creators; Descript enters the professional market driven by text-based video editing. Domestically, Jianying and iQIYI-backed BoomCut continue to ramp up their AI editing capabilities while possessing massive user bases and mature commercialization pipelines. ChatCut's differentiation lies in conversational interaction combined with professional director aesthetic judgment, yet facing free giants like CapCut, its monetization model and user retention still face severe challenges.