Cardboard: The Agentic Video Editor for Fast Teams

Cardboard is an agentic video editor built for a world where video has become the default language of the internet. Founded in 2025 and backed by Y Combinator’s Winter 2026 batch, the company is tackling a problem that nearly every growth, marketing, and content team feels daily: shipping high-quality video consistently is still painfully slow.

While demand for video has exploded across social platforms, landing pages, ads, and internal communications, the process of turning raw footage into a polished video remains stuck in the past. Agencies are expensive. Professional tools require years of experience. Feedback cycles drag on for days or weeks. Momentum dies before ideas ever make it to production.

Cardboard exists to change that reality. Its core promise is simple but ambitious: give teams the power of professional video editors without the learning curve, timelines, or overhead. Instead of wrestling with timelines and effects from scratch, users give Cardboard their footage and a goal—“cut this into three ad variants,” “make a 30-second hook,” or “turn this into a testimonial”—and receive a strong first cut in minutes.

In doing so, Cardboard aims to become for video what Canva and Figma became for design: a fast, collaborative workspace that removes friction and lets teams focus on storytelling rather than tooling.

Why Has Video Editing Become Such a Bottleneck for Modern Teams?

Video is no longer optional. It is the primary distribution channel for growth, marketing, and brand storytelling. The teams that win are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets, but the ones that iterate fastest. Every new experiment—whether a short social clip, a product walkthrough, or a testimonial—adds compounding attention over time.

Yet most organizations are sitting on mountains of unused assets. Product demos, customer interviews, webinars, screen recordings, blog posts, changelogs, and newsletters all contain valuable stories that could be repurposed into compelling video content. The ideas exist. The raw material exists. What breaks down is execution.

Getting to a first cut still means hours of manual labor. Editors must scrub through footage, name files, assemble rough timelines, and wait for asynchronous feedback. Even with powerful tools like Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve, the barrier to entry is high. The result is that teams ship far fewer videos than they should—not because they lack creativity, but because the editing process cannot keep up with the pace of modern content demands.

This gap between intent and output is exactly where Cardboard positions itself.

How Does Cardboard Redefine Video Editing Through Agentic AI?

At its core, Cardboard is an agentic video editor that lives entirely in the browser. Rather than treating AI as a bolt-on feature, the product is designed around the idea of an “AI director” working inside a professional-grade editor.

Users start by describing what they want. A simple instruction—such as “make a 60-second recap,” “cut this into ads,” or “highlight the best testimonials”—is enough for Cardboard to reason over the footage and generate a first cut. This is made possible by advances in multimodal large language models that can understand video, audio, and context, combined with modern browser technologies like WebGPU and WebCodecs.

Once the first cut is generated, the human remains firmly in control. Users can refine the output directly on a timeline, adjusting pacing, rearranging clips, and iterating quickly. The goal is not to replace human creativity, but to remove the tedious steps that slow creators down.

Cardboard also introduces semantic search for footage. Instead of hunting through folders and filenames, users can search by meaning—finding moments where a customer expresses excitement, or where a key product feature is explained. This transforms raw footage from a chaotic archive into a usable creative resource.

Why Is Building Cardboard Technically So Difficult?

What makes Cardboard especially ambitious is that it is solving two notoriously hard problems at the same time.

The first is building a high-performance non-linear editor (NLE) in the browser. Video editing is computationally demanding, memory-intensive, and sensitive to latency. Historically, professional editors have relied on native desktop applications for a reason. Achieving similar performance in a browser environment requires deep expertise in web systems, graphics pipelines, and performance optimization.

The second challenge is building an agentic editor that is reliable enough for real production use cases. Many startups focus on AI workflows without worrying about professional-grade editing. Others build powerful editors but avoid rethinking the workflow entirely. Cardboard is attempting to combine both—an editor that feels fast and familiar, with an AI system that can reason, plan, and execute creative tasks consistently.

Incumbent tools face a different problem. Their stacks are deeply entrenched, and rebuilding from the ground up risks breaking existing workflows. This creates an opening for a new entrant that can rethink the editor from first principles without legacy constraints.

Who Are the Founders Behind Cardboard?

Cardboard is founded by Saksham Aggarwal and Ishan Sharma, two longtime friends who met in school and have known each other for over fifteen years. Their shared history is more than a personal anecdote—it is a key part of why Cardboard exists at all.

Saksham previously served as co-founder and CTO of Iterate AI, an EF-backed startup, and has built AI products across multiple domains. He studied computer science at BITS Pilani, has published research at ACL, and has spoken internationally on AI evaluation. His background also includes being the first engineer at PYOR, a company backed by Coinbase and Castle Island, and working in growth at Sequoia-backed Flint. Beyond engineering, Saksham is an active content creator, posting regularly on platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn and experiencing firsthand the pain of slow video workflows.

Ishan brings deep technical expertise in high-performance browser systems. He spent over four years at HackerRank, where he led multiple zero-to-one products used by millions of developers worldwide. Long before that, he built Hotspoter, a Windows application that crossed more than five million downloads and was featured on platforms like CNET and Softonic—an achievement he reached while still in school. His career has been defined by working on memory-heavy, performance-critical web applications, making him uniquely suited to tackle the challenges of browser-based video editing.

Together, they form a rare combination: one founder deeply embedded in AI and content creation, and the other with years of experience pushing browsers to their limits.

Why Are Saksham and Ishan Uniquely Positioned to Solve This Problem?

The idea for Cardboard did not come from market research alone; it came from lived experience. Saksham regularly produces social content that reaches hundreds of thousands of views per month. Ishan spent years producing polished internal launch videos for HackerRank’s all-hands demos, often for audiences of hundreds.

Despite their different contexts, both ran into the same wall. Professional tools were powerful but slow. Learning curves were steep. Getting to a first cut took hours, turning creativity into manual labor. Instead of focusing on storytelling, they found themselves fighting software.

This shared frustration led to a clear insight: the bottleneck was not talent or ideas, but tooling. Cardboard was conceived as a way to remove those painful steps, allowing creators and teams to focus on what they do best.

Their combined skill sets—AI research, growth intuition, and deep browser engineering—make them unusually well suited to build the editor core that others avoid.

How Does Cardboard Fit Into the Broader Shift Toward Browser-Based Creative Tools?

Over the past decade, creative work has steadily moved into the browser. Design tools like Figma and Canva demonstrated that collaboration, speed, and accessibility could outperform traditional desktop software. Developers embraced cloud-based IDEs and collaboration platforms. Video, however, remained one of the last holdouts.

Cardboard is part of a broader shift that suggests this is finally changing. Advances in web technologies now make it possible to handle video processing at scale, while AI systems can shoulder much of the cognitive load involved in editing. The browser is no longer just a viewer—it is becoming a full-fledged creative environment.

By living entirely in the browser, Cardboard lowers the barrier to entry for teams. There is no heavy installation, no machine-specific setup, and no siloed workflows. Collaboration becomes natural, iteration becomes fast, and experimentation becomes cheap.

What Does “Vibe Editing” Mean in Practice?

Cardboard’s founders often describe the product as enabling “vibe editing.” Rather than obsessing over timelines and technical details from the outset, users start with intent and feeling. What is the story? What is the goal? What should the viewer feel in the first five seconds?

The agentic system handles the mechanical work of assembling a coherent first cut that matches that intent. Humans then step in to refine tone, pacing, and emphasis. This shift mirrors changes in other creative disciplines, where tools increasingly handle execution while creators focus on direction.

In practice, this means going from a sea of raw footage—talking heads, screen recordings, screenshots, and B-roll—to a usable video in seconds rather than hours. It also means making iteration the default state, not an exception.

What Is Cardboard’s Long-Term Vision for Video Production?

Cardboard’s ambition extends beyond being a faster editor. The company envisions becoming the default workspace for video production, especially for teams that care about speed and iteration.

As video continues to dominate distribution, the advantage will belong to those who can test, learn, and adapt quickly. Cardboard positions itself as the tool that enables this compounding effect, turning video from a bottleneck into a flywheel.

Much like Canva and Figma redefined design collaboration, Cardboard aims to redefine how video is made—collaborative, fast, and accessible, with AI doing the tedious work in the background. In a world where attention compounds for those who iterate fastest, Cardboard is betting that the future of video belongs to teams who can move at the speed of thought.