By Riley Kaminer
Sometimes the best deals happen far outside of the board room. For brothers Ivo and Vicente Machado, co-founders of AI-powered video editing platform Wisecut, that was at a breakfast in a restaurant on the sidelines of a conference in Brazil.
Best of all, the commitment to the deal was enshrined on the back of a napkin.
The deal: $1 million from legendary Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper. CEO Ivo, a Brazilian video editor turned entrepreneur who arrived in the US eight years ago, previously won a scholarship for Draper University.
The brothers were back in São Paulo for a conference when they were invited by a fellow Draper University alum to a breakfast with Draper himself. After trying the platform out for himself, Draper got excited enough to want to take a first-row seat in the Wisecut journey by becoming an investor, Ivo explained to Refresh Miami.
“In Tim Draper, we found not just money, but alignment with our strategic vision for the future of Wisecut,” said Ivo. “He really understands the bigger vision of Wisecut, which is democratizing video.”
Wisecut has developed a platform that automatically edits the raw video files that its users upload. The platform was founded four years ago, much before the recent hype around AI.
“I remember pitching four years ago, and people didn’t even believe we could do what we were saying,” Ivo recalled. “It’s funny because entrepreneurs are so often faced with skepticism when they’re starting the business, but then eventually they happen to be in the right place at the right time.”
Ivo isn’t worried about the rise of competitors in the space. “We were one of the first, and there is definitely a first-mover advantage,” he said. “Now that there are a lot of newcomers, we know that we have to constantly improve every day. We also see now that consumer expectations are higher, which pushes us to do even more.”
One way Wisecut is responding to this increasingly competitive landscape is by launching a series of new features. For instance, the company is integrating generative AI to summarize audiovisual content autonomously. The ideas is that, eventually, Wisecut will be able to take an hour long video and shorten it to a minute long clip. Similarly, Wisecut will be able to chop up content into short clips – all with a simple text prompt from users.
“This is huge for video streamers! Wisecut uses AI for video editing. It will save you hours, and the final version will be better than if you did it yourself,” Draper said in a statement. “I signed with Wisecut on a napkin. Ivo and Vicente make an awesome team with huge potential to revolutionize the media toolbox of any business and any individual.”
Including Draper’s funds, Wisecut has now raised $1.29 million. This includes investments and/or grants from Google for Startups’ Latino Founders Fund, Meta, Mana Ventures, and TheVentureCity. According to Ivo, Wisecut’s platform currently has 350,000 users.
What accounts for that growth? “Creators that work with us want to spend more time making their creation better and not spend all their time video editing,” said Ivo. “So they just upload their content to Wisecut, and that’s it.”
Photo at top of post: Wisecut co-founders Vicente Machado, left, and Ivo Machado, right, with legendary investor Tim Draper, commemorating their “napkin round.”
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