Wisecut’s video editing platform lets creators and educators put out content in a flash

By Riley Kaminer

Video content continues to play an important role in business’s marketing strategy. Research suggests that the average viewer retains 95% of a message when they watch it, compared to 10% when they read it.

The problem? Dealing with video takes a significant amount of time and effort – somewhere around 30-60 minutes of editing work alone for each finished minute of video content.

Ivo Machado has firsthand experience getting caught up in the vortex that is video editing. The Brazilian native spent years in the heart of Hollywood working as a video editing supervisor.

“I had 10 editors under me and saw an opportunity because they were spending a lot of time editing videos,” Machado told Refresh Miami. That’s when Machado’s inner entrepreneur kicked in. “I thought, what if we could have an algorithm go through this audio and make editing decisions much faster.”

In 2019, Machado began working to make this dream a reality. The serial entrepreneur, who previously founded three other companies, teamed up with his brother Vicente, a software engineer. After launching new iterations of the platform around five times – and leaving Los Angeles for Miami – the duo landed on what is today Wisecut.

Wisecut uses AI and voice recognition to edit videos for you. The platform starts just like a professional editor does: by removing silences to leave users with the raw footage. It then lets users create subtitles, add background music, and create clean jump cuts. Wisecut has developed what it calls a “storyboard-based” video editor, which enables users to edit their video content by moving around text from the automatically-generated transcript. 

Up to now, Wisecut has mainly been used by influencer-type content creators – the creatives pumping out hours of YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok content each week. Increasingly, however, the platform is becoming popular in educational contexts.

“We noticed during the pandemic that educational institutions started to post the video recordings from their Zoom classes,” said Machado. After linking up with one of the largest educational groups in Brazil – with hundreds of thousands of students and 2,000 hours of video created each day – the Wisecut team learned that students weren’t really engaging with the recordings.

“It wasn’t like one of the YouTube videos they were used to watching,” noted Machado, comparing raw Zoom footage with the highly-produced, glossy content popular on YouTube. With Wisecut, this educational group is able to quickly and easily package their videos into content that its students actually want to watch. Machado is doubling down on the educational vertical, working on developing an API to enable companies like this one to edit their content at scale.

Earlier this month, Wisecut scored $100,000 in non-dilutive funding as part of Google’s Latino Founders Fund. On top of the funding, Wisecut will also receive hands-on programming and support from Google, deep mentorship from technical and business experts, access to free mental health therapy, as well as a community of fellow founders.

Machado said that this funding will help them accelerate their sales processes and expansion into the EdTech space. This is the second external investment Wisecut has received, the first being from TheVentureCity. That, in part, lured Machado back to Miami – after having left in 2016.

“Back in 2016, there wasn’t as much going on with startups in Miami,” said Machado. “Fast forward to the pandemic, and there’s a lot of excitement.”

Next up for Wisecut: raise a seed round of somewhere around $1 to $1.5 million. That will enable the team to expand its core staff from three employees to 12 within the next year.

Photo at top of post: Wisecut co-founders and brothers Ivo, left, and Vicente Machado.

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Riley Kaminer