Clueso, creator of an agentic video creation platform that’s designed specifically for business teams, said today it has raised $10 million in a new early-stage round of funding.

Dharana Capital led the Series A round, which saw participation from Founders Fund, Neotribe Ventures, Y Combinator and f7 Ventures. It brings the startup’s total amount raised so far to over $12 million.

Generative artificial intelligence has come a long way in terms of its ability to generate high-quality videos on the fly, based on nothing more than natural language prompts, but the bulk of the innovation in this area has focused purely on consumers and the creator economy. Enterprise-grade video content is much harder to produce using such tools.

Businesses have a need to produce vast amounts of video-based content, ranging from customer onboarding instruction to software tutorials and employee training videos. These sorts of things can’t be created using a consumer-focused app that has no way to understand these things. That’s why most organizations continue to rely on manual video creation in the studio.

Clueso co-founder and Chief Executive Akash Anand (pictured, center, alongside co-founders Prajwal Prakash and Neel Balar) told SiliconANGLE that he experienced the friction of making slick product videos for tutorials and marketing purposes firsthand when building his previous company Desklamp Inc., which developed a collaborative note-taking application aimed at students.

“To create marketing videos for Desklamp, we would book a studio, film ourselves, record our voiceovers, animate the UI in Adobe After Effects, and edit every cut by hand,” he explained. “A single video could take two weeks to produce. Agencies quoted us $6,000 per video, which was money we simply couldn’t afford.”

Anand and his co-founders built Desklamp during the early days of generative AI, when high-quality generative video simply wasn’t a thing. It’s only in the last couple of years that AI models have advanced enough to automate many of the video-making processes that were previously done manually – such as scriptwriting, voiceover recording, video editing and so on. But many of these new capabilities, available in tools like ChatGPT and ElevenLabs, remain focused on consumers rather than oriented for business use.

“We saw an opportunity to bring these technologies together into a single platform built specifically for business video creation, and that became Clueso,” Anand said.

Clueso goes further than consumer-grade video creation tools. The platform leverages a team of autonomous AI agents that can navigate real software interfaces to capture footage of them as they’re being used. Based on the objective, such as creating a tutorial video for a note-taking app, Clueso’s agents will play around with the app and its documentation to build up a proper understanding of the product and its capabilities.

It then gets to work, writing the necessary script and taking into account the brand’s messaging requirements, then generates the video, the voiceovers, motion graphics and other effects requested by the users. Once the first video is ready, users will be able to request edits that Clueso’s agents will handle.

Users can easily enforce their brand’s standards through the use of custom “Clueprints,” which are similar to an agent “skill” in that they give the agents access to all of the information and messaging related to a specific product. These Clueprints are self-updating, so when the underlying project is updated with a new feature, the video itself can also be updated to reflect this change, ensuring that the content is up to date.

It’s this agility that sets Clueso apart, Anand insisted, because businesses are moving faster than ever thanks to autonomous coding tools like Claude and Codex.

“New products are launching, processes are changing and new tools and ways of working are being introduced constantly,” he said. “None of these changes are valuable if customers and employees don’t adopt them, and video is one of the best mediums to make that happen. The problem is that traditional video production doesn’t keep up.”

One of the first companies to benefit from Clueso’s automated video production is Zendesk Inc., which claims to have seen productivity gains of more than five times and an 80% reduction in video production costs.

Zendesk Senior Manager of Instructional Design Kevin Gross said his company uses Clueso to make videos for both customer education and internal enablement. “Clueso’s agent makes it easy to automatically transform product knowledge into polished, engaging learning experiences with far less manual effort,” he said. “It has helped us reduce production time and expand our video output.”

Going forward, Clueso wants to expand its go-to-market operations and get more businesses to start automating video production. It plans to grow its team from 35 employees to 50 by the end of the year, while extending its agentic video production capabilities into new formats such as interactive product demos and documentation creation.

“The long-term vision is for agents to handle more of the production work, while humans remain in control of the creative decisions,” Anand stressed. “People should spend less time operating editing tools and more time deciding what stories are worth telling and how they should be told. This is what Clueso allows.”

Photo: Clueso