Kino AI: Product, team and how it was built
Kino AI (AI video editor and footage library for teams and coding agents, United States): Desktop editor live with paid seats, November 2026. Evidence grade E: no revenue figure was checked. Team: 2 founders, Wesley Block and Luke Igel; 4 people on Y Combinator's page in November 2026. Launched July 2023; still running.Added 6 November 2026
- Outcome
- Desktop editor live with paid seats, November 2026
- Evidence
- E no revenue figure was checked
- Launch
- July 2023
- Status
- Still running
- Team
- 2 founders, Wesley Block and Luke Igel; 4 people on Y Combinator's page in November 2026
- Outside funding
- Y Combinator (Summer 2023) and AI Grant batch 2; amounts not stated in the sources read
- Group
- Video generation
- Main channel
- Not stated
What is not verified
No revenue figure was found. I looked for a payment-processor profile, a founder interview with figures and a filing; the sources read give only prices, a team of 4 and the funding batches. A reader could look for a Y Combinator Demo Day figure or a funding announcement that states revenue. This story is grade E: the business is real and its product, price and customers are described from public pages, but no revenue figure was checked. Aiolum shows it as an idea worth studying, not as proof that it makes money.
Kino AI started as a footage logging tool, software that records what each video clip contains (scene, take, speakers, objects) so editors can find it later. Its first public feature, announced in July 2023, let a user search a whole footage library in plain language. By November 2026 the home page sells a full editor in which footage, the edit and review notes live in one place, and in which an AI agent, a program that uses a language model to carry out multi-step tasks, cuts videos on the same timeline as the human editors.
Wesley Block and Luke Igel met as first-year students at MIT in 2018 and from November 2020 made a documentary, MIT:Regressions, the Launch YC post says. Y Combinator's page lists the company as founded in 2022, in the Summer 2023 batch, with 4 people. AI Grant lists it in its batch 2 as "organize video assets".
No revenue figure was found. The pricing page shows a free plan and a paid Editor Plus seat, which Kino's pricing page gives as US$200 per person per month, so the headline is the fact that paid seats are on sale.
How much revenue does Kino AI make?
Each row shows the evidence grade and the source numbers from the list at the end of this page. The grades are explained in How Aiolum verifies.
| Fact | Value | Grade | How we know | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | not found | E | No payment-processor profile, founder interview or filing with a revenue figure was found in the sources read. | [1, 2, 4] |
| Paid plan on sale | Editor Plus, US$200 per person per month | C | Kino's pricing page, read 6 November 2026: "Editor Plus is $200 per person per month". The FAQ also says "Existing Business subscriptions keep their original allowances", so an earlier paid plan had subscribers. | [2] |
| Founded | 2022 | C | Y Combinator company page, field year_founded. | [4] |
| Founders | Wesley Block and Luke Igel | C | Launch YC post signed "Wes and Luke"; Luke Igel's profile on the page: "MIT '23. Formerly NASA JPL, SpaceX, Slack, CSM, KoKo." | [4] |
| Team size | 4 | C | Y Combinator company page, read 6 November 2026. The page also lists an open job for a founding engineer. | [4] |
| Funding | Y Combinator Summer 2023; AI Grant batch 2 | B | Y Combinator's page gives the batch; AI Grant's home page lists "Kino AI — organize video assets" under batch 2. No amount is stated in either page. | [4, 5] |
| Launch post | 12 July 2023 | C | Launch YC post "Kino AI - Silicon Valley meets Hollywood": first feature is natural-language search in a footage library, running locally on the editor's machine; pilots with production companies, creative agencies and corporate video teams. | [4] |
| Months from the launch post to the headline | 40 | calc | Calculated: July 2023 to November 2026. | [4, 2] |
| AI models named by the company | Claude, GPT and Grok for the agent; Seedance via reAPI; fal for generated media | C | Changelog: "Agents in the desktop app run on GPT-6.1 Sol and Claude Sonnet 5.5" and "Agents can generate images, video, music and voice through fal, billed at cost". Pricing FAQ: Seedance 2.5 credit "through reAPI". | [3, 2] |
| Platforms | macOS, Windows, Ubuntu desktop apps; MCP for outside agents | C | Home page download buttons and "Install with your agent". | [1] |
How to read this table: grade C is what the company writes on its own pages or its Y Combinator profile. Grade B is an investor's own list. A "calc" value was computed on this page. No revenue figure exists in the sources read.
| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 | 0 | full editor, 100 MCP calls a week, monthly chat allowance |
| Editor | price not readable (loads by script); unlimited MCP calls, review links | ||
| Editor Plus | 200 | per person; agent and Seedance credits, 4 TB pooled storage |
The FAQ says the Free plan includes the full editor, unlimited imports and exports, a monthly allowance of Kino chat credits and 100 MCP tool calls a week. The Editor plan adds unlimited MCP calls, more credits, cloud storage and review links; its price is in the plan cards, which could not be read. The FAQ says Editor Plus includes US$100 of agent credit, US$75 of Seedance video-generation credit and 4 TB of pooled storage per seat. A yearly switch exists, but yearly prices could not be read. Usage of your own AI provider account is billed by that provider.
When did Kino AI launch, and how did it grow?
From a footage-tagging waitlist in June 2023 to an editor that AI agents work in, in about three and a half years. Each entry carries its grade.
- 2018 to 2020CThe founders meet as first-year students at MIT and, from November 2020, make the documentary MIT:Regressions. [4]
- 2022CKino AI is founded, Y Combinator's page says. [4]
- 5 June 2023CThe trykino.com page describes an AI assistant for footage metadata and asks visitors to join a waitlist for a private beta. [6]
- 12 July 2023CLaunch YC post during the Summer 2023 batch: natural-language search across a footage library, with pilots at production companies. [4]
- June 2025CThe kino.ai home page sells logging and search for production teams, with transcription in five languages and a demo booking. [7]
- July to October 2026CThe changelog adds trim tools, the built-in Kino Agent (September), templates, tabs and custom panels; the pricing page sells Editor and Editor Plus seats in November. [3, 2]
Why did Kino AI work?
Four causes, in the order they mattered. Each one is a reusable lesson.
Start from a narrow, painful job
Logging footage is slow manual work for assistant editors. The first product only tagged and indexed clips, a job that speech and vision models could do well in 2023.
Make the library the base of the editor
Because every clip is already transcribed and described, an agent can find material and cut a draft without a human pointing at files. The editor grew on top of that index.
Let outside agents in
MCP access lets Claude Code or Codex work in a Kino project. The free plan caps MCP calls at 100 a week, and paid seats remove the cap, so agent use drives upgrades.
How it was built
These details come from the company's own pages and its Y Combinator page. They are grade C. [1, 2, 3]
- Motion graphics and animation are "Built upon Remotion", the home page says.
- The built-in agent runs with Claude, GPT or Grok; outside agents connect through MCP.
- Footage is transcoded into 720p proxies and backed up to the cloud, so projects stream on any machine.
- Generated images, video, music and voice come through fal; Seedance video credit is sold through reAPI.
Tools named in the sources
Each one opens its page in the Tools tab, with every story that uses it.
Who tried this before Kino AI, and why did they fail?
Two companies in our database of failed startups tried to make video editing easier with software and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.
HighlightCam
The promiseAn algorithm that finds the most engaging moments in raw footage and edits them automatically.
Why it diedVideo processing was expensive on the cloud of the time, and smartphone apps and consumer editors such as iMovie made simple editing free.
ReelSurfer
The promiseClip and share parts of online videos in a simple editor.
Why it diedYouTube and Facebook added the same clipping and sharing features, and storage and bandwidth costs were high.
The failed startups come from our database of 1,749 dead startups, retold here in our own words. Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so these cards carry no evidence grade.
What changed
Both predecessors paid heavily for video processing and lost to large platforms that added the feature for free. Kino moves part of that cost to the customer's machine (the 2023 post says indexing ran locally) and bills model usage as credits or through the customer's own AI provider account.
Its buyers are production teams with terabytes of camera footage, not consumers, and AI agents that can cut a draft from a searchable library did not exist when the predecessors were running.
Can one person copy Kino AI now?
Hard for one person.
A full editor that plays camera raw formats, streams proxies and syncs teams is a large engineering job, and Kino had two founders, accelerator money and a team of 4. The first step, an AI index of a narrow kind of file for one profession, is copyable alone.
Where it is still open: Indexing and agent access for other large private file libraries: audio archives, design files, scanned documents.
- 1Pick a manual logging or tagging job that one profession does every day.
- 2Run speech and vision models over the files and make the result searchable.
- 3Expose the index to coding agents through MCP and cap the free tier by calls.
- 4Grow toward the tool the profession already pays for once users live in your index.
What could go wrong for Kino AI?
The risks are the mirror image of the causes above.
What is not verified
No revenue figure was found. I looked for a payment-processor profile, a founder interview with figures and a filing; the sources read give only prices, a team of 4 and the funding batches. A reader could look for a Y Combinator Demo Day figure or a funding announcement that states revenue.
Downloading YouTube videos
The changelog lists "Download a YouTube video into your library from the desktop app", and the home page shows the prompt "Find and insert YouTube b-roll". YouTube's terms and the copyright of the downloaded clips are the user's question; the pages read say nothing about permission.
Identifying people in footage
The home page says every clip "knows who's in it", and the 2025 page listed "identify people". This runs on the customer's own footage; the pages read do not describe consent or how faces are matched.
Dependence on model providers
The agent runs on Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol, the changelog says, with Grok as an option; generated media comes through fal and Seedance through reAPI. Price or access changes at these providers reach Kino's credits directly. The changelog also lists voice generation through fal; no voice-cloning feature was found in the pages read.
Competition
On this site it sits in the video group with stories such as Revid.ai and Diffusion Studio, but its own home page names its targets as Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut, Descript, Dropbox and Frame.io, products from much larger companies.
Sources
The grade next to each source is the best grade that the source can support. "Read in full" means that the text of the page was downloaded and the numbers were checked in it.
- C Kino home page, read 6 November 2026Read in full (trykino.com redirects here). Source for the product, platforms, Remotion and the YouTube and people-identification wording.
- C Kino pricing page, read 6 November 2026Read the FAQ text; the plan cards load by script and could not be read. Source for the Free and Editor Plus terms and the Seedance credit.
- C Kino changelog, July to October 2026, read 6 November 2026Read in full. Source for the agent models, fal, the YouTube download feature and the 2026 releases.
- C Y Combinator company page: Kino AI, with the Launch YC post of 12 July 2023Read in full, including the embedded launch post and founder profile. Source for the founding year, batch, team size and founders' story.
- B AI Grant home page, company list, read 6 November 2026Read the company lists. Kino AI appears under batch 2.
- C Internet Archive copy of trykino.com, 5 June 2023Read in full. The early waitlist page.
- C Internet Archive copy of kino.ai, 12 June 2025Read in full. The 2025 logging and search product.
- C Database of failed startups, local exportLocal export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.
Run this company? Send corrections or a verified figure to aiolum@livyden.com