Narrative Clips the Roar, Not Just the Goal

Watch a stadium after a goal. The ball crossing the line lasts a heartbeat. What lingers is everything after - the players sprinting to the corner flag, the bench emptying, the section of the crowd that comes apart at the seams. Erik Vank noticed that most highlight software cuts away right before the part people actually rewatch. Narrative, the company he co-founded, is built on the opposite instinct.

Narrative is a Y Combinator (Fall 2025) startup that automates the creation and distribution of sports highlights. Its pitch is deceptively simple: feed it a live broadcast, and it returns a publish-ready clip in under 30 seconds - not just the play, but the reaction that gives the play its meaning. Underneath that consumer-friendly promise sits something less flashy and more valuable: video-processing infrastructure and an API that other broadcasters, teams, and leagues can build on.

The ProblemHighlights are slow, expensive, and mostly manual

Ask anyone who has done sports post-production and they'll describe the same grind: an editor scrubs through hours of footage to surface the 45 seconds worth publishing, tags it, cuts it, adds b-roll, and pushes it out - often long after the moment has cooled. Fans wait hours for highlight packages. The economics only work at the top of the market, which is why professional leagues get slick reels and a high school soccer team gets nothing.

The ProductAn editor that behaves like it understands video

Y Combinator's shorthand for Narrative is "Cursor for professional video editing" - a tool that doesn't replace the editor but removes the repetitive 80% of the work. In practice, the AI editor can add b-roll to a timeline based on the transcript, search a massive video library in plain English to find similar clips, pull selects, generate social-ready stringouts, and batch iterations through a chat interface. The pieces that used to eat an afternoon become a conversation.

That "understand" step is the real engineering problem. Detecting that a goal happened is object recognition; knowing that the celebration is the payoff is closer to editorial taste. Narrative's founders spent months building a video-editing agent that watches footage the way a person does - and, in a familiar startup twist, discovered they were spending most of their time building the infrastructure underneath it. So they made the infrastructure the company.

Who It's ForBroadcasters at the top, everyone the incumbents priced out

The named customers are broadcasters, sports teams, leagues, and professional post-production teams. But the more interesting target is the long tail Vank keeps returning to: college and high school athletics, where nobody can justify a human editor per game. If AI can produce a watchable reel for a few dollars of compute, thousands of games that never got covered suddenly can be. That's the market shape - serve the underserved segment the incumbents skipped, then let automation do the reaching.

The LandscapeWhere Narrative sits

Automated sports highlights isn't an empty field. WSC Sports and Magnifi have spent years selling real-time clipping to major broadcasters; newer entrants like BlendVision and Cutsio work adjacent angles. Narrative's wedge is twofold - a product built around fan emotion rather than pure event detection, and an API-first posture that treats the editor as one surface on top of infrastructure others can embed.

The TeamThree builders, one pivot

Narrative was founded in 2025 by three people who like shipping. Erik Vank, the CEO, came from Apple and studied at Brown. Aryan Sawhney, the technical co-founder, has a background in computer vision and software engineering research with stints at earlier startups. Victor Chapman rounds out the founding team. They're small, fast, and public about it - product launches and product philosophy show up on LinkedIn almost as fast as the clips do.

The BusinessAn app on top, an API underneath

Narrative makes money the way modern infrastructure companies do: a B2B software product plus usage-based API access. Teams and broadcasters pay for the editor to cut their content; developers pay to run video through the pipeline programmatically. The 2025 seed round from Y Combinator and Pioneer Fund funds the race to embed that pipeline before the moment - and the market - passes. In January 2026, Sports Video Group featured the company as a New Sponsor Spotlight, with Vank explaining why AI highlights could matter most for the resource-constrained corners of sports.

For a company built on speed, the founding lesson is oddly patient: the highlight is the easy part. Knowing which second to keep is the whole game.