Sanket Shah and Anshul Khandelwal's InVideo: Building India's Gen AI Canva for video editing

By 2021, InVideo Studio, as the product had been labelled, had built up a steady user base and was making some 800,000 videos a month. But even as it did that, a year later, sales had begun to plateau at a time when the global uptake for AI had begun to see significant growth. Among his two co-founders, one had left as early as 2020, and the other was soon on his way out. 

Shah, though, had no plans to give up. And that’s when Anshul Khandelwal, a mathematics graduate from the Indian Statistical Institute, joined him at InVideo as a senior vice president for engineering. “I think Anshul is the best engineer I have ever met,” Shah says. 

By 2022, with Anshul on board, Shah decided to pivot the company to capitalise on the AI wave that was reshaping the tech industry. It was the year that saw the launch of ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot developed by the American company OpenAI. Soon, InVideo ditched its strategy, and while it realised that it might be too small to have an innovation dilemma, decided to reimagine its entire product from scratch.  

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The new product, Shah says, is where all the magic has happened. “We went from 0 to $70 million in revenue on the new product within 18 to 19 months of launch,” Shah says. “The magic happened with the strategy we built between August and December 2022 and the execution between January 2023 and August 2023.” 

“AI is changing the way we create content, and the one role I believe that will change meaningfully is that of the video editor creator,” says Rishen Kapoor, vice president at Peak XV. “InVideo, while still early in its journey, is already showing us glimpses of what the future of video editing could look like. I hope that soon, anyone, regardless of their skill level, will be able to create high-quality videos that clearly and authentically communicate their ideas. I’m genuinely bullish that InVideo will be the product that gets us there. I have immense confidence in Sanket, Anshul and their team. They’re a special group of builders.”

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Today, the company employs about 80 people, largely in production, with just two product managers. A significant clientele of the company is on the consumer side, with nearly 65 percent of them being content creators. The remaining are small businesses, and the company has more than 6 million active users spread across 190 countries In all, the company has so far raised about $55 million, with its last round in 2022 when it raised funds from the likes of Peak XV, Tiger Global, Hummingbird and RTP Global. 

“We have laid the foundation towards the mission of creating video solutions that anyone can use,” says Khandelwal, co-founder and the chief product and technology officer, InVideo. 

Currently, the company offers free video creation for 10 minutes per week with four video exports. The paid service varies between $28 and $96 per user for between 50 minutes and 200 minutes of video creation.  

“I think if we build this the right way, we can build a billion-dollar company,” says Shah.