Creating video is getting easier. Finishing it isn't.
AI writes code and you still review it before it ships. AI makes clips now, and someone still has to assemble them into something you'd actually publish. That's the layer cofounders Saksham and Ishan are building at Cardboard.
Two engineers who met in school and taught themselves filmmaking in Bangalore by studying Apple's launch films. Saksham describes Cardboard simply: it's Cursor for video editing.
There's no good VS Code for video, so they're building one. You throw your clips in and give it a goal, and it hands back a first cut in minutes. Brief it the way you'd brief a junior editor.
Video isn't one problem, which is what makes the editor core hard. Screen recordings need different ML pipelines than talking heads or sports footage, so a routing model decides where each query goes.
They don't want to be an AI feature inside the existing editor. They want to build the editor itself.
00:45 The Cursor comparison, and why editing is the product
01:10 Learning filmmaking by studying and recreating Apple's launch films in Bangalore
02:30 The YC launch that reached roughly half a million views
03:15 What WebGPU and multimodal models unlocked
04:40 Why they want to own the whole editor instead of plugging into Final Cut
05:10 AI-generated clips are a new camera—and they still need editing
05:50 Why video is one of AI's hardest multimodal problems
07:00 Briefing Cardboard like a junior editor
07:40 Why they stopped selling launch videos to focus on product