Dumme, a startup putting AI to practical use in video editing, is already generating demand before opening up to the public. The Y Combinator-backed company has hundreds of video creators testing its product, which leverages AI to create short-form videos from YouTube content, and a waitlist of over 20,000 pre-launch, it says. Using a combination of both proprietary and existing AI models, Dumme’s promise is that it can not only save on editing time but also — and here’s its big claim — do a better job than the contracted (human) workforce who is often tasked with more menial video editing jobs, like cutting down long-form content for publication on short-form platforms like YouTube Shorts, TikTok or Instagram Reels.
Founded in January 2022 and a participant in startup accelerator Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 program, Dumme co-founder and CEO Merwane Drai said he was originally focused on building a search engine for video. But around six months ago, the team realized that a better product might be to repurpose the same AI models they were developing to edit video clips instead.
Joined by co-founders Will Dahlstrom (CPO) and Jordan Brannan (CTO), all with AI backgrounds, Drai realized Dumme may have landed on the right product-market fit after their app went viral, crashing their servers.
“We didn’t really expect that it would get a lot of traction or anything, so we just put something out there,” Drai explains. “Then what happened is that overnight, we woke up to overloaded servers — like, nothing actually worked. So we took everything down and actually put together some sort of waitlist,” he continues. “The next morning, we probably woke up to 5,000 people in there, which was interesting.”
The team later discovered that a
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