Cardboard
Cardboard is a YC Winter 2026 (W26) company. Based in San Francisco, CA, USA. Team of 2.
About Cardboard
Summary
Cardboard builds an AI-native video editor that runs in the browser and on Mac, targeting growth and marketing teams as well as independent creators who need to produce videos at high volume. Teams feed it raw footage and a brief, and the editor produces an editable first cut in minutes, replacing the cycle of external agencies, slow turnarounds, and back-and-forth reviews. From that cut, users refine edits through chat or direct timeline manipulation, generate B-roll, music, voice-overs, and motion graphics, and share or export without leaving the tool.
Business model
A free entry point leading to paid plans, as shown on the site's pricing page.
Go-to-market
Cardboard targets growth and marketing teams at companies and serious individual creators who ship video regularly. Users start self-serve through the browser or Mac app, with a prompt or uploaded footage as the entry point.
From the Y Combinator listing
Agentic video editor
Cardboard is an agentic video editor for growth/marketing teams and serious creators who need to ship videos consistently. Instead of agencies, long timelines, and infinite review cycles, teams give cardboard a footage + a goal (“3 variants”, “30s hook”, “testimonials”) to get a strong first cut in minutes on which they can iterate quickly. Multimodal LLMs can finally reason over footage, and WebGPU/WebCodecs make a real NLE possible in the browser. For the first time, an “AI director” inside a professional editor can be a reality. We have to build two hard things at once: a high-performance editor in the browser and an agentic editor that is reliable for production use cases. Most startups do one; incumbents can’t rebuild their stack without breaking everything. Saksham and Ishan met in school and have known each other since 15 years. Saksham was Co-founder/CTO of Iterate AI (backed by EF) and posts content on social media; Ishan has spent ~5yr building memory-heavy, performance-critical browser apps at HackerRank (S11) and deeply understands browsers. He has built Hotspoter (5M+ downloads) when he was 14. Together, we’re 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.
Facts
- B2B / B2B
- San Francisco, CA, USA
- 2
- Active
- Early
Founders (2)
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