ChatCut founders Alima Strickland (L) and Kaiwen Li
ChatCut, a conversational AI video editing platform founded by director and producer duo Kaiwen Li and Alima Strickland, has closed a US$1.35 million seed funding round led by ZhenFund with participation from Antler.
The Singaporean startup will use the money to accelerate product development, enhance existing capabilities and invest in infrastructure. ChatCut will also expand its engineering team, focusing on hiring both AI and full-stack engineers.
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ChatCut aims to revolutionise post-production by translating natural-language prompts into polished, professional video edits. This enables creators and teams to accelerate the process from raw footage to published content in minutes.
Li and Strickland’s journey into entrepreneurship was driven by a persistent industry pain point. The duo– the brains behind the VICE documentaries, Discovery Channel shows, and commercials for high-profile brands such as Airbnb, Gucci, and Chanel–experienced the difficulty of the editing bottleneck firsthand. For documentaries and commercials, editing routinely takes two to ten times longer than the actual filming process. They noted that even as AI sped up other elements of the post-production pipeline, editing remained a frame-by-frame manual effort.
ChatCut addresses this issue by tackling the actual editorial work–structure, pacing, and story flow–through conversation, rather than focusing solely on surface-level fixes like trimming background noise or adding captions.
Product and traction
The platform operates on a simple premise: Chat + Cut. Users upload their footage and input conversational requests, such as “Turn this 3-hour podcast into a highlight reel,” “Find all mentions of entrepreneurship,” or “Remove all pauses longer than 3 seconds”. Tasks that typically take a professional editor a full day to complete can be finished in as little as ten minutes using the platform.
ChatCut is positioned to capitalise on the increasing market demand for faster publishing cycles and consistent brand quality, as enterprises look to standardise on AI tools to reduce manual review rounds and localise content at scale.
The company views video editing as an entry point to developing a comprehensive video creation platform that will ultimately integrate cutting-edge AI capabilities for users working with recorded footage, AI-generated content, or hybrid approaches.
Co-founder Strickland stated that the company is “democratising editing capabilities and enabling world-class editing judgment into an intelligent agent anyone can access through conversation”. She added that for teams, this means faster outcomes, whilst for newcomers, editing is “no longer a barrier to publishing”.
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Antler Partner Winnie Khoo noted that the investment will enable further market penetration: “GenAI has crossed into everyday marketing and product work. ChatCut translates that capability into outcomes teams can publish today. The next step, and what this round enables, is pushing that experience into more formats, more integrations, and more markets”.
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