video-api
(8)
The Austrians Who Wrote the Rulebook for How the Internet Plays Video
Stefan Lederer and his co-founders helped write MPEG-DASH during their PhDs. Then they built a company on top of it - and won an Emmy for the encoding tech that keeps modern streaming from choking.
Narrative
Narrative is a San Diego and San Francisco based Y Combinator (Fall 2025) startup building AI-powered infrastructure for sports content creation. Its platform turns live broadcasts into publish-ready highlight clips in under 30 seconds and gives professional video editors an AI editor - described as 'Cursor for professional video editing' - that adds b-roll from transcripts, searches large video libraries in natural language, and batches edits through chat. Narrative sells both an editor product and a video-editing/clipping API to broadcasters, teams, and leagues.
Vonage
Vonage is a cloud communications company that lets businesses and developers add voice, video, SMS, messaging and network-based verification to their apps and customer operations. Once a pioneer of home internet phone service, it reinvented itself as a platform business built on APIs, unified communications and contact-center software, and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Ericsson operating as its Global Communications Platform.
LemonSlice
LemonSlice is a San Francisco AI research and product lab that turns a single photo into a real-time, talking video avatar - the visual face for voice agents and chatbots. Its Lemon Slice-2 model is a purpose-built, large-scale video diffusion transformer that generates every pixel from scratch to produce expressive, full-emotion talking characters (human or cartoon) that livestream at conversational speed. Founded in 2024 by three PhD-creators (formerly Infinity AI), the company raised a $10.5M seed led by Matrix Partners and Y Combinator to make all video interactive.
Daily
Daily is a San Francisco developer platform for real-time voice, video, and AI. Founded in 2016 by Kwindla Hultman Kramer and Nina Kuruvilla, the company runs a global WebRTC mesh that powers video calling for products like Pitch, AppFolio, Kumospace, and HotDoc, and it created Pipecat - the open-source orchestration framework now used as the backbone for production voice agents at companies like NVIDIA, Cresta, and Epic.
Mux
Mux is the video API for developers. The San Francisco company gives engineers a simple set of endpoints for live streaming, on-demand video, encoding, playback, and quality-of-experience analytics, so they can ship video features without rebuilding the streaming stack from scratch.
Voximplant
Voximplant is a cloud communications and voice AI orchestration platform that lets developers and enterprises add programmable voice, video, messaging and AI agents to their apps without managing telecom infrastructure. Spun out of click-to-call pioneer Zingaya, it powers billions of calls a year for brands like Hyundai, Burger King, KFC, Glovo and Rappi.
Steve Heffernan
Steve Heffernan is the co-founder and product architect at Mux, the developer-first video infrastructure platform, and creator of Video.js - the open-source HTML5 video player powering playback on Amazon, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Dropbox with over 38,700 GitHub stars. Previously co-founded Zencoder (YC W10), the cloud video encoding startup acquired by Brightcove for $30M in 2012. A self-described hacker on video, he is now leading the ground-up rebuild of Video.js v10 at Mux, which raised $105M Series D in 2021.