Bootstrapped on $30K of internship savings, the Y Combinator-backed startup now serves users in more than 190 countries
VideoGen, an AI video platform whose agents work with users through structured workflows to create fully editable, copyright-free videos, has passed 5 million users in more than 190 countries and today announced a $3.3 million seed round. The company launched in August 2023 on $30,000 of the founders’ internship savings and bootstrapped for its first year before joining Y Combinator in summer 2024.
The round includes Y Combinator (S24), Rebel Fund, Lobster Capital, and Stretford End Capital, with participation from Mento VC, Pioneer Fund, and Decacorn VC. VideoGen will use the funding to scale its team and grow its brand.
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Video is the dominant format on the internet, but making it remains hard, time-consuming, and expensive to outsource. VideoGen’s AI agents work with users at every step, turning a brief or uploaded media into fully editable videos through structured workflows and reusable assets. They can coordinate multiple related videos from a single brief, keeping every deliverable consistent through shared context and assets. The platform includes realistic AI voiceovers with more than 200 voices in over 50 languages and accents. Users can translate a video with one click, then edit and share entirely in the browser with no downloads required. For developers and tech-first companies, VideoGen also offers a Text-to-Video API and MCP integration for programmatically generating and editing videos.
VideoGen supports a range of business use cases. Performance marketing and e-commerce teams use it to create product videos, ads, and campaign creative, while learning and development teams use it to create training, e-learning, and onboarding videos.
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Today, VideoGen serves thousands of customers, from individual creators and small businesses to teams at Fortune 500 companies.
“Most AI video tools give you a clip. Nobody wants a clip, they want a finished video. VideoGen automates the entire edit, and through our API and MCP, companies now generate videos without ever opening an editor. Full automation is where video is going, and 5 million users suggest the market agrees,” said Anton Koenig, co-founder and CEO of VideoGen.
“VideoGen solves the biggest pain points of video production: complexity, cost, and time. In just a few clicks, anyone can create professional, copyright-free videos,” said Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, a VideoGen investor.
Koenig and David Grossman launched VideoGen in 2023 while still in college, pooling $30,000 from their internship savings. The two met as middle schoolers at a tennis academy, where doubles tournaments turned into a friendship built on a shared obsession with coding, AI, and online video. Koenig studied Computer Science at UMass Amherst and interned at Amazon Web Services and FactSet before leaving college to build VideoGen full time. Grossman interned at Palantir and graduated from Brown University with degrees in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics while VideoGen passed one million users. In summer 2024, the company joined Y Combinator’s S24 batch, with mentorship from Garry Tan.
