INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Need to resize a video for IGTV Add subtitles for Twitter Throw in sound effects for YouTube Or collage it with other clips for the
Instagram feed Kapwing lets you do all that and more for free from a mobile browser or website
This scrappy new startup is building the vertical video era creative suite full of editing tools for every occasion.Pronounced &Ka-pwing,&
like the sound of a ricocheted bullet, the company was founded by two former Google Image Search staffers
Now after six months of quiet bootstrapping, it announcing a $1.7 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins.Kapwing hopes to rapidly adapt
to shifting memescape and its fragmented media formats, seizing on opportunities like creators needing to turn their long-form landscape
videos vertical for Instagram recently launched IGTV
The free version slaps a Kapwing.com watermark on all its exports for virality, but users can pay $20 a month to remove it.While sites like
Imgur and Imgflip offer lightweight tools for static memes and GIFs, &the tools and community for doing that for video are kinda
inaccessible,& says co-founder and CEO Julia Enthoven
&You have something you install on your computer with fancy hardware
You should able to create and riff off of people,& even if you just have your phone, she tells me
Indeed, 100,000 users are already getting crafty with Kapwing.&We want to make these really relevant trending formats so anyone can jump
&Down the line, we want to make a destination for consuming that content.&Kapwing co-founders Eric Lu and Julia EnthovenEnthoven and Eric Lu
both worked at Google Image Search in the lauded Associate Product Manager (APM) program that minted many future founders for companies like
But after two years, they noticed a big gap in the creative ecosystem
Enthoven explains that &The idea came from using outdated tools for making the types of videos people want to make for social media —
short-form, snackable video you record with your phone
It so difficult to make those kinds of videos in today editors.&So the pair of 25-year-olds left in September to start Kapwing
They named it after their favorite sound effect from the Calvin Hobbes comics when the make-believe tiger would deflect toy gunshots from
&It an onomatopoeia, and that sort of cool because video is all about movement and sound.&After starting with a meme editor for slapping
text above and below images, Kapwing saw a sudden growth spurt as creators raced to convert landscape videos for vertical IGTV
Now it has a wide range of tools, with more planned.The current selection includes:Meme MakerSubtitlesMulti-Video Montage MakerVideo
CollageVideo FiltersImage To Video ConverterAdd Overlaid Text To VideoAdd Music To Video With MP3 UploadsResize VideoReverse VideoLoop
VideoTrim VideoMute VideoStop Motion MakerSound Effects MakerKapwing definitely has some annoying shortcomings
There an 80mb limit on uploads, so don&t expect to be messing with much 4K videos or especially long clips
You can&t subtitle a GIF, and the meme maker flipped vertical photos sideways without warning
It also lacks some of the slick tools that Snapchat has developed, like a magic eraser for Photoshopping stuff out and a background
1 thing it needs is a selective cropping tool
Instead of letting you manually move the vertical frame around inside a landscape video so you always catch the action, it just grabs the
That left me staring at blank space between myself and an interview subject when I uploaded this burger robot startup video
It something apps like RotateNFlip and Flixup already offer.Beyond meme-loving teens and semi-pro creators, Kapwing has found an audience
The simplicity and onscreen instructions make it well-suited for young students, and it works on Chromebooks because there no need to
download software.The paid version has found some traction with content marketers and sponsored creators who don&t want a distracting
That business model is always in danger of encroachment from free tools, though, so Kapwing hopes to also become a place to view the meme
That network model is more defensible if it gains a big enough audience, and could be monetized with ads
Though it will put it in competition with Imgur, Reddit and the big dogs like Instagram.&We aspire to become a hub for consumption,&
&Consume, get an idea, and share with each other.&
