For Kaiwen and Alima, becoming startup founders was never part of the plan. For years, they crafted commercials for iconic brands like Chanel, Gucci, and Airbnb, and produced documentaries for Warner Bros Discovery and VICE Media. Their work earned them numerous accolades, including the Telly Award for Best Documentary Series (Bronze) in 2024. Their crime thriller short film was showcased at the Cannes Film Festival Short Film Corner and was an Official Selection at the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival, one of Asia’s most prestigious film showcases.
Their journey into entrepreneurship is driven by a pressing market need in video editing. For the documentaries and commercials they edit, the process typically takes 2 to 10 times the amount of time it takes to film. Editing remains an extremely manual, frame-by-frame process. Before AI became mainstream, that was simply the reality. But when AI speeds up other parts of the video production process, Kaiwen and Alima saw this as an opportunity to build something transformational.
What added fuel to the fire is that although new “AI video editing” apps emerge frequently, most fundamentally misunderstand what editing truly entails. To many outsiders, editing seems limited to adding captions or removing ums and ahs.
For documentary projects Kaiwen and Alima tackle, the shooting ratio is often 100-200:1, meaning they film 100 to 200 hours of footage to produce a 1-hour video.
Editing isn't about "removing the bad parts"—it's about finding the story, making connections, and experimenting with different narrative possibilities. Videos are fundamentally narrative structures ideally suited for large language models (LLMs). “A story is basically a logic machine, and who better to assist you than an LLM’s reasoning capabilities?" - says Kaiwen.
That's how ChatCut was born. It helps editors, producers, directors, marketing teams, and content creators edit at a fundamental story level. ChatCut is your superhuman assistant editor. Forget about prepping footage manually. Everything is logged, analyzed, and processed by multimodal models. You can ask questions, feed in shooting scripts or client feedback, rapidly assemble a rough cut, and vibe-edit your way to the ideal final product.
Seamlessly integrating into professional workflows, ChatCut allows you to export your edits to other editing apps (non-linear editors) or DAWs (digital audio workstations) for sound mixing and further polishing, ensuring that editors maintain complete control throughout the process.
In essence, ChatCut functions as an extension of your editing team, speeding up the entire process by up to 80%, significantly cutting down on both time and costs for any production.
Building ChatCut: Disrupting Video Editing with AI Innovation
For Kaiwen and Alima, ChatCut is the result of their desire to solve a persistent problem in the world of video editing. “We wanted to create something that takes the hassle out of editing, so anyone within the industry can focus on the most important aspect of this unique industry–their art”. Their goal is to help multi-media producers streamline their workflow and work more efficiently.
As ChatCut continues to grow, Kaiwen and Alima remain dedicated to improving the platform and making it even more useful for editors, producers, creators and marketers everywhere.
Experience ChatCut today and see how its AI-powered tools can transform your editing process. Sign up for the beta version now and start editing with ease!
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