Cardboard

Cardboard (cardboard.ai) is an AI video editor that turns raw footage into finished videos, from social clips and highlight reels to product demos, launch videos and event recaps. Describe the video you want, and Cardboard turns your clips, photos, recordings or a link into an edit you can watch, change and export, in the browser, in the Mac app, or right inside ChatGPT and Claude. It pulls out the best moments, removes pauses and filler words, adds captions, titles, music and B-roll, and reframes for Reels, Shorts and TikTok. It’s built for marketing teams, founders and creators who need video every week without learning a timeline.

Say what you need, like “three 30-second ad variants” or “a customer testimonial from these interviews”, and Cardboard’s AI agent, Director, builds a first cut in minutes. You refine it by chatting or on a full timeline, with your team. Cardboard edits the footage you already have. Unlike AI video generators such as Runway or Sora, it doesn’t create new video from a text prompt.

- Recreate the style of a reference video with your own footage.

- Make motion graphics from a prompt, from animated titles to 3D scenes like a spinning product shot.

- Cut to the beat, with match cuts, transitions and effects synced to the music.

- 80+ ready-made recipes (templates) for videos like launch videos, product showcases, podcast clips, webinar highlights, and testimonials.

- Export the finished video, or hand the timeline off to Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve.

Why now: AI models can finally understand video, and WebGPU makes a professional editor possible in a browser tab. Most AI video tools are either an old editor with AI bolted on, or an agent with no real editor behind it. Cardboard is built to be both.

Team: Saksham Aggarwal (CEO) and Ishan Sharma (CTO) have been friends for 15 years, since school. Saksham studied computer science at BITS Pilani, was co-founder and CTO of Iterate AI (backed by Entrepreneur First), and worked in growth at Sequoia-backed Flint. Ishan spent nearly five years building performance-critical browser apps at HackerRank (YC S11), and at 14 built Hotspoter, a Windows app with over 5 million downloads.

Together, they are unusually suited to build the editor core others avoid.

Video is becoming the default distribution channel, and the team that iterates fastest compounds attention. Cardboard becomes the default workspace for video production, the way Canva/Figma became the workspace for design - because it’s collaborative, fast, and does the tedious parts for you.

(formerly usecardboard.com or cardboard.sh)