Sanket
Shah

In 2012, Sanket Shah was a graduate student in Ann Arbor, Michigan, running late on a book he'd promised himself he'd finish. His solution was characteristic: don't just read faster - rethink the whole format. He started making 10-minute YouTube summaries of non-fiction books. People watched. A lot of people watched.

That YouTube channel became Vistify Books - his first company. Then came MassBlurb, a digital marketing platform he co-built and eventually sold to Mobikon in 2016 for several million dollars. Two ventures in, Shah had a reputation in Mumbai's startup circles as someone who built things people actually used. But he wasn't satisfied. Video creation was still absurdly hard. Professional tools required years of learning. Even basic editing demanded creative expertise most people didn't have.

In 2017, Shah and two co-founders - Harsh Vakharia and Pankit Chheda - started InVideo with a single-minded premise: making a video should be as easy as writing a document. Not just simpler. Actually easy.

The gap InVideo identified was real and enormous. A billion-dollar content economy had emerged - YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn - where video was the dominant currency. But 99% of people who wanted to participate couldn't, because the tools were built for professionals, not people.

Shah's philosophy from the start was counterintuitive for a SaaS company: strip away settings. Don't give users more options - give them better defaults. "Fewer barriers and the freedom to create," he said, was the design principle that drove every product decision. InVideo launched with templates and a drag-and-drop interface. Within a few years, it had millions of users. Then came AI.

InVideo v3.0, launched in late 2024, was the step Shah had been building toward. Type a prompt. Get a full video. Not a slide deck with music - an actual video, with footage, voiceover, subtitles, and a music track, all assembled automatically. The platform doesn't run on one proprietary model; it orchestrates a pipeline of the best available AI models to produce the result. Seven million videos generated in a single month. A $50 million annual revenue run rate. Four million monthly active users.

The numbers are impressive, but the operating philosophy is what separates InVideo. Shah insists on 30-second customer support response times - for every customer, including the ones paying $10 a month or nothing at all. Most SaaS companies reserve fast support for enterprise clients. Shah's bet is that treating free users like VIPs creates the word-of-mouth that enterprise sales teams can't buy. So far, 50 million accounts across 190 countries suggest the bet is working.

By 2026, Shah had expanded InVideo's ambition into territory that would have sounded like science fiction when he was making book summaries in Michigan. The company partnered with Abundantia Entertainment - one of India's most respected film studios - to launch an AI-driven film production venture backed by $11 million. The plan: five AI-made films over three years, co-developed using InVideo's tools and Abundantia's creative infrastructure. The companies also announced a collaboration with Google Cloud to build enterprise-grade AI production pipelines for studios, broadcasters, and ad agencies.

Shah's framing on the film studio deal is deliberate and precise: "This is about accelerating and enhancing creativity, not just automating it." It's a distinction he makes carefully, at a moment when the creative industry is navigating real anxiety about AI replacing human work. Shah positions InVideo - and himself - on the side of the creator, not the machine.