OpusClip
Last reviewed
Jun 4, 2026
Sources
21 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v1 ยท 2,421 words
Improve this article
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Last reviewed
Jun 4, 2026
Sources
21 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v1 ยท 2,421 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
OpusClip is an AI video-repurposing tool that turns long-form videos into short, social-ready clips, ranking the moments most likely to go viral and adding animated captions, automatic reframing, B-roll, and AI-generated hooks and titles. It is built by Opus AI (legally Immersively Inc., sometimes branded "Opus Pro" after its domain opus.pro), a company founded in January 2022 by Young Zhao (chief executive officer), Grace Wang (chief marketing officer), and Jay Wu (chief technology officer). The product launched in 2023 and grew unusually fast, reaching one million dollars in annual recurring revenue within roughly two weeks of its public launch and more than five million users within its first seven months. By 2025 the company said it had passed ten million, then twelve million, creators and brands. OpusClip has raised about 50 million US dollars, including a round led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 that valued it at 215 million US dollars, and it is one of the better-known applications of generative AI to short-form video production.
OpusClip's founder, Young Zhao, had built companies before. He co-founded a social app called Sober in 2013 and, by his account, previously ran a social-media talent agency managing several hundred influencers, an experience that exposed him to the labor-intensive work of cutting long videos into short clips for distribution. Co-founder Grace Wang studied finance at Peking University and worked on user growth and go-to-market strategy at ByteDance (TikTok's parent) from 2019 to early 2022 before joining the company. Co-founder and CTO Jay Wu earned a computer-science degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and had been an engineering manager at Airbnb.
The three founded the company in January 2022. Its first product was not a clipping tool at all but a live-streaming and interactive-video studio, variously described as Opus Studio, an AI-powered live-streaming tool with features such as AI-generated memes and interactive overlays. That product gained only modest traction (the team has cited on the order of a couple hundred users after a few months), but users kept asking for one feature in particular: a way to automatically cut highlights out of longer recordings. A small team (around five people, including three engineers) rebuilt that clipping feature into a standalone product.
OpusClip entered private beta in April 2023 and launched publicly in May 2023. Growth was immediate and is the part of the company's story most often retold in startup circles. The company says it reached one million dollars in annual recurring revenue within fourteen days of the public launch, drew more than 200,000 signups in its first four weeks, and surpassed five million users by the end of 2023, roughly seven months after launch. Early demand was strong enough that users asked to pay simply to skip the processing queue and to export at higher resolution.
By the time of its August 2024 funding announcement the company reported more than six million users and "eight-figures" in annual recurring revenue. Independent trackers have estimated revenue in the range of about ten to twenty million US dollars for 2025; the company itself has not published audited financials, so revenue figures should be treated as estimates or self-reported.
OpusClip has raised approximately 50 million US dollars in disclosed equity funding. Reporting on the rounds can be confusing because the company folded earlier seed money into the headline figure it announced in 2024, and because the same investors (notably DCM Ventures, AI Grant, and Millennium New Horizons) recur across rounds. The two publicly announced milestones are summarized below; amounts are in US dollars.
| Announced | Headline amount | Lead investor | Valuation | Selected other investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 31, 2024 | $30M (Series A, including prior seed) | Millennium New Horizons | not disclosed | AI Grant, Samsung Next, GTMfund, DCM Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Fellows Fund, Alpine VC, Jason Lemkin (angel) |
| March 11, 2025 | $20M (closed December 2024) | SoftBank Vision Fund 2 | $215M | DCM Ventures, AI Grant, Millennium New Horizons (existing investors) |
The first milestone, announced on August 31, 2024 alongside the launch of ClipAnything, was a Series A led by Millennium New Horizons that the company described as bringing its total raised to 30 million US dollars, a figure that rolled in earlier seed financing. An earlier venture round in mid-2023 was led by Fellows Fund and formed part of that cumulative total. Angel investor Jason Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, also participated.
The second milestone was a 20 million US dollar investment led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2, with existing backers DCM Ventures, AI Grant, and Millennium New Horizons participating. SoftBank first approached the company in late September 2024 and the round closed by December 2024; OpusClip publicized it on March 11, 2025, the same day it launched OpusSearch. That round valued the company at 215 million US dollars and brought total funding to about 50 million US dollars. SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 has backed other AI companies such as Glean. (Some third-party databases list a higher cumulative total or an additional "Series B"; those figures are not supported by the company's own announcements or by the primary news coverage, which consistently cite roughly 50 million US dollars in total.)
OpusClip's core workflow takes a long video (uploaded directly or imported from a URL such as a YouTube link), analyzes it, and returns a set of short vertical clips with captions, reframing, and other edits already applied. The company positions the tool for podcasters, YouTubers, marketers, agencies, and brands who want to convert one long recording into many short posts for TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels.
The flagship engine, ClipAnything, launched on August 31, 2024 and is described by the company as the first multimodal AI video-clipping model. Earlier auto-clipping tools, including OpusClip's own first version, leaned heavily on the transcript: they looked for keywords and complete sentences in spoken dialogue. ClipAnything instead applies multimodal video understanding across three channels at once:
Because it does not depend on dialogue, ClipAnything can clip genres that talking-head tools could not handle well, such as vlogs, sports, gaming, documentaries, music videos, and behind-the-scenes footage. Users can let the system auto-detect a genre and propose prompts, or type a natural-language prompt ("find the funniest moments," "clip every goal") to pull specific scenes. A Fast Company report in 2024 highlighted exactly this capability: trimming videos even where there is no spoken dialogue to anchor on.
Each candidate clip is given a Virality Score from 0 to 99. The company says the score weighs four factors: Hook (whether the opening grabs attention and ties to the core topic), Flow (whether the clip tells a complete, well-paced story), Value (emotional resonance and usefulness to the viewer), and Trend (alignment with current audience interests). OpusClip presents the score, along with suggestions, as a way to decide which clips to publish first. The company has not published a technical specification or validation study for the score, and reviewers generally treat it as a useful heuristic rather than a guaranteed predictor of performance.
Around the clipping engine OpusClip has built a broader editing and distribution suite. Key features the company advertises include:
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
| AI Reframe / ReframeAnything | Automatically resizes and recomposes video for vertical, square, or horizontal aspect ratios, tracking the active speaker or subject so it stays in frame |
| Animated captions | Generates synced captions, which the company markets as exceeding 97 percent accuracy, with animated styles |
| AI B-Roll | Inserts relevant B-roll footage automatically, the company says within about a minute |
| AI hook and title generation | Writes attention-grabbing opening hooks and clip titles |
| Brand templates | Applies custom fonts, colors, logos, and intros/outros for a consistent look |
| Social scheduler | Schedules and cross-posts clips to multiple social platforms from one place |
| Export to XML | Exports timelines for Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve for further manual editing |
| Multilingual support | Supports captions and processing in English plus a stated 20-plus additional languages |
The company also offers a team workspace, a YouTube thumbnail generator, AI audio enhancement, AI voice-over, and an API for programmatic access.
OpusClip has pushed beyond one-off clipping toward end-to-end, agent-driven video creation. OpusSearch, announced on March 11, 2025, lets professional creators and businesses search an entire back catalog of video, spin up topic-specific channels, react to trends, and resurface and monetize archival footage; the company described it as an AI growth tool rather than just an editor.
In August 2025 the company launched Agent Opus, an AI agent that creates short-form videos from an idea in almost any form (text, a link, an audio file, or a blog post) rather than only repurposing an existing recording. According to OpusClip, Agent Opus researches a topic by pulling real-time assets from the web (social posts, news headlines, clips), writes a script and storyboard, sources visuals, adds motion graphics, generates a voice-over, and outputs a captioned, platform-ready video. The move extends the product from repurposing into generative video workflows and squarely into the question of how far AI can automate the creator's job, a debate the company leaned into by staging a December 2, 2025 live "showdown" pitting human editors against Agent Opus and rival AI tools (Invideo, HeyGen, and Captions). OpusClip framed the event around the position that AI will accelerate rather than replace human creators. The company has also added third-party automation through a Zapier integration (September 2025).
OpusClip uses a freemium subscription model. Plans are billed by "processing minutes" of source video per month, with higher tiers removing the watermark and unlocking collaboration and scheduling. As of 2025 the published consumer tiers were approximately:
| Plan | Price (monthly) | Processing minutes | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | ~60 | Watermarked exports, no Virality Score, short project retention |
| Starter | ~$15 | ~150 | Watermark-free exports |
| Pro | ~$29 | ~300 | Team collaboration and social scheduler; annual billing discounts available |
| Business | Custom | Custom | API access, additional seats, SOC 2 Type II compliance, dedicated support |
Pricing and limits have changed over time and during promotions, so the figures above are indicative of the 2025 structure rather than a current price list. In early funding coverage the company cited starter pricing around 19 US dollars per month and a pro tier around 29 US dollars per month, alongside add-on AI credits and B2B enterprise contracts.
OpusClip's growth is its headline achievement. The company reported passing five million users by the end of 2023, more than ten million creators and brands by early 2025 (who, it said, had created over 172 million clips that collectively drew 57 billion views in the prior year), and, by its two-year anniversary in mid-2025, more than twelve million creators who had produced over 229 million clips. Marketing materials in late 2025 cited figures around sixteen million creators and businesses. These are company-reported numbers and have not been independently audited, but they are consistent across the company's announcements and the news coverage of its funding.
The company lists a range of media organizations, brands, and high-profile creators among its users, including Univision, Billboard, iHeartMedia, Visa, LinkedIn, Vox Media, and creators such as Grant Cardone, Logan Paul, Mark Rober, and the team behind The Diary of a CEO. Trade and review coverage generally credits OpusClip with saving creators substantial editing time and with a strong free tier, while cautioning that auto-generated clips still need human review and that the Virality Score is a prioritization aid rather than a guarantee. OpusClip operates in a competitive and fast-moving segment alongside tools such as Vizard, Munch, Captions, HeyGen, and Klap, and more broadly against general AI video tools built on advances in large language models and diffusion-based generation.