video-api
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Cloudinary built a business on the image nobody wants to resize
Every beautiful website has an unglamorous back room. Cloudinary turned that room into a service, then grew to $100 million in annual recurring revenue before Blackstone bought a stake.
The People Who Built the Phone Switch Want to Run the Conversation
FreeSWITCH helped teach the internet to make phone calls. SignalWire is trying to teach those calls what to do next - and to keep the AI close enough to hear the answer.
Hedra Taught a Photograph to Speak. Then It Had to Learn to Listen.
A singing picture brought Hedra its first rush of users. The harder business was learning what creators needed after the joke landed: a place to plan, test, make and revise the whole piece.
OpusClip Paid People to Use Its First Product. Then One Feature Found 5 Million Users
The livestreaming app stalled at roughly 200 users. Its clipping tool did the opposite - revealing a useful lesson about product-market fit, creator software and the limits of one-click editing.
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.