Two childhood friends built video editing's Cursor

In eighth grade, Ishan Sharma built an app. It went on to cross 5.7 million downloads and get written up on CNET and Softonic. For his friend Saksham Aggarwal, watching that happen from the next desk over was the first proof of something that would shape both their careers: you can put a thing on the internet, and the entire world can find it.

That memory sat quietly for over a decade while both of them went and built other things. Saksham studied computer science at BITS Pilani, co-founded and ran engineering at Iterate AI — a startup backed by Entrepreneur First — published research at the ACL conference, and did stints as the first engineer at Coinbase-backed PYOR and in growth at Sequoia-backed Flint. Ishan spent close to five years at HackerRank, shipping multiple products from zero to millions of users.

Two People, the Same Wall, Years Apart

Neither of them set out to build a video company. They arrived at the same problem from opposite directions.

Saksham had become a creator on the side — Instagram and LinkedIn, averaging around 250,000 views a month. Ishan, meanwhile, was the person HackerRank turned to for the launch videos shown at its all-hands events, in front of 350-plus people. Different jobs, same task: turn raw footage into something worth publishing.

Both hit the identical wall. Tools like Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve are genuinely powerful — and genuinely brutal to learn. Getting from a folder of clips to a usable first cut ate hours neither of them had, and the tools themselves treated every edit as manual work: hunt for the good take, trim it, caption it, export it, repeat.

"Sounds Cool" — Ten Days to Apply, Ten Days In

Saksham mentioned to Ishan what he'd been tinkering with — an early attempt at automating the parts of editing that were pure drudgery, not craft. Ishan's answer was short: it sounded cool, and he wanted in.

Ten days later, the two of them applied to Y Combinator together. Ten days after that, they were in — part of the W26 batch, on a $500K seed round backed by YC alongside a Tier-1 fund and founders of billion-dollar companies. For two people who'd known each other fifteen years, the actual decision to start a company took less time than most people spend picking a company name.

Building the "Cursor for Video Editing"

Saksham describes what they're building simply: "Cursor for video editing." There's no equivalent yet of what Cursor did for code — an AI layer that understands the raw material well enough to do the boring 80% for you and hand back a real first draft, not a blank timeline.

Cardboard runs entirely in the browser. Point it at raw footage and it analyzes the material to surface the actual highlights, reframes a single clip into vertical, square and landscape cuts, writes captions in a chosen style, dubs and translates voice across languages, cleans up audio, and takes plain-language editing instructions the way a person would give notes to a junior editor. None of it replaces judgment — it replaces the hours spent on tasks that don't need judgment.

The team behind it is small and specific: Saksham as CEO, Ishan as CTO, an approach built entirely around the exact friction they'd both separately spent years fighting.

Who's Actually Paying for It

Early customers include PostHog, Autumn AI and General Legal — teams that need to ship video regularly and don't have a production department to do it. Pricing starts at $32 a month, priced like a tool a small team expenses without a purchase order, not an enterprise contract that needs a champion and a procurement cycle.

That's a deliberate bet: the market isn't professional post-production houses defending their craft, it's the growth and marketing teams who currently either avoid video because it's too slow, or send it to an agency because in-house editing doesn't scale. Cardboard is built for the team that wants to publish today, not the team optimizing for the perfect cut three weeks from now.

The Lesson: Build the Tool You Were Already Missing

The most useful thing about Cardboard's origin story isn't the YC speed-run — plenty of teams get funded fast and still build the wrong product. It's that neither founder started by researching a market. They started by being personally, repeatedly annoyed by the same three-hour editing session, in two completely different jobs, years apart. The company only exists because that shared annoyance turned out to be a real, common, expensive problem the moment they compared notes.

Conclusion

If you're a founder chasing a "big idea," it's worth asking the smaller question first: what task do you personally redo every week that a well-built tool should have already killed? Want to find your specific growth leak? Run DoableClaw's free audit at doableclaw.com — takes 2 minutes, no signup.