Yahoo Finance The rise of video editing start-up Veed to 10 million users
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Watch: Veed co-founder on start-up challenges
“Words can’t describe the pain and suffering,” says Sabba Keynejad, as he recounts the early days of starting Veed, the video editing platform he co-founded in 2018.
Having met at an online hackathon in their late 20s, Keynejad and Tim Mamedov went through their £40,000 personal savings to kickstart the company. Despite the early challenges, Veed has now grown to revenue of around £23m and users ranging from bird-watching grannies to news publications and governments creating videos on the platform.
“We tried to fundraise, we couldn’t and were both broke,” says Keynejad, who grew up in Norfolk. “Mental health took a pretty big hit, I put on weight and it was affecting my social life.”
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There was the time he kicked a wall in frustration — “it was like a physical manifestation of remembering where I was and how hard it was,” admits Keynejad — and the penniless Friday nights where he would instead go to the gym, cycle for two hours listening to podcasts and trying to motivate himself. “It was pretty dark,” he adds.
When Mamedov landed a contract role at BT, he gave Keynejad half his monthly salary to continue building the company. That lasted for six months before Keynejad followed suit. Their income still funded Veed, paying for servers and hiring two engineers to build their product.
“We did everything possible to soften the blow,” says Keynejad. “We would turn up at Google’s office asking for free Cloud credits and luckily we got them. We were hustling.
“But I believe I can do anything if I can put my mind to it. I used to ask myself ‘why can they make revenue and have a start-up and I can’t? What do they know that I don’t?’ All I had to do was work that out. That was the pursuit and that’s what we did.”
With the video editing industry expected to grow to $5.2 billion by 2028, the co-founders had first set out with intentions of democratising the visual content industry.
The entrepreneurs received their first paid user in June 2019 and hit 100,000 earlier this year. From a bootstrapped start-up to, in 2022, securing $35m (£27.8m) in funding from Sequoia, the Silicon Valley-based VC, Veed last year doubled its annual recurring revenue to over £19m and now has more than 10 million users and over 170 staff. Veed works remotely but also has presence in London, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Lisbon.
“I’ve seen it all,” says Keynejad. “In the first two years until we got to £6m in revenue, any paid user could book a call with me. I spoke to hundreds of users and got to know many of them.
“I was friendly with a community of real estate agents in Northern Ireland. One of them was making videos about houses she had taken to market and she reminded me a lot of my mum.”
Other users create content ranging from subtitling French films into German for an overseas lover, to a disabled customer who would film deer in his garden from a bedroom window. “For me it’s not what I’ve seen but what’s been achieved,” adds Keynejad.
“There is a really early user of ours who was a marketeer creating videos. She then built a solid audience on LinkedIn. Over a year, it allowed her to quit her job and she uses LinkedIn to acquire clients for her business. That’s pretty cool.”
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Elon Musk even tweeted a recent video which, says Keynejad, was made on Veed. “The only reason I know is because he didn’t change the default colour of the subtitles,” he adds.
“The format of talking heads is popular, from a yoga teacher to a large corporation giving their team the ability to create and share videos.
"I always say that Veed is one of the tools that the president of the United States could use but also a school child. That’s the spectrum.”
Video subtitling is one feature which has boosted Veed’s output. Previously, consumers had to manually type out, before Veed made it a one-click solution through its AI capabilities.
“What we didn’t realise at the time is that when you can take a job from a user that is laborious and in one click complete that job that is invaluable,” admits Keynejad.
“Now the user can very quickly dub a video into 20 languages, create a podcast snippet, resize it and put it on Instagram."
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Its latest product developments include VideoGPT, the world’s first text-to-video AI video generator, which has stayed in the ChatGPT stores top 10 GPTs since it debuted, AI avatars, billed as the most realistic on the market, and a feature to combat deepfakes.
“The thing we are trying to solve is how to make people feel more comfortable and more at home on video,” says Keynejad.
“For me, my favourite thing is that for two million videos created in a month, let’s say all them got 100 views, that’s 200 million people who watched videos that came out of Veed. That’s pretty impactful.”
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