BREAKING

AI COWORKER FOR VIDEO EDITORS ★ YC WINTER 2026 ★ 50+ BRANDS ONBOARDED IN 75 DAYS ★ HOURS OF FOOTAGE PREP IN MINUTES ★ RUNS 100% ON-DEVICE ON APPLE SILICON ★ NATIVE ADOBE PREMIERE PRO INTEGRATION ★ 10 HOURS SAVED PER EDITOR PER WEEK ★ 2,500+ VIDEOS ORGANIZED FOR ONE DOCUMENTARY IN HOURS ★ AI COWORKER FOR VIDEO EDITORS ★ YC WINTER 2026 ★ 50+ BRANDS ONBOARDED IN 75 DAYS ★ HOURS OF FOOTAGE PREP IN MINUTES ★ RUNS 100% ON-DEVICE ON APPLE SILICON ★ NATIVE ADOBE PREMIERE PRO INTEGRATION ★ 10 HOURS SAVED PER EDITOR PER WEEK ★ 2,500+ VIDEOS ORGANIZED FOR ONE DOCUMENTARY IN HOURS ★

YC W26 / B2B AI / VIDEO TECH

Wideframe

Do hours of video work in minutes.

Video editing has a dirty secret: the actual editing - the creative, crafty, timeline stuff editors went to film school for - is only about a quarter of the job. The other 75% is hunting through raw footage, organizing clips, labeling everything, building bins, building sequences. It's grunt work. Wideframe is the AI coworker that handles that 75%.

YC Winter 2026 Apple Silicon On-Device AI Adobe Premiere B2B SaaS

Daniel Pearson - Co-Founder & CEO

The Big Idea

The part of editing nobody romanticizes

There's a fantasy version of video editing that involves a lot of creative instinct, clever cuts, and inspired music choices. The reality involves staring at a folder called "RAW_FOOTAGE_FINAL_v3" and figuring out which of the 400 clips inside actually has what the client wants.

Wideframe was built by two people who had spent years on the client side of that problem. Daniel Pearson ran an agency that produced thousands of video ads for brands like Uber, DoorDash, and Dropbox - he managed over $1 billion in growth budget and watched talented editors burn hours doing work a well-trained assistant should handle. Zachary Kim, a 2x Y Combinator founder with 20+ years of engineering experience, saw the same problem from the tech side.

They'd been close friends and ex-coworkers for 15 years. In 2025, they built the assistant editor they'd always wanted.

"OH MY GOD YOU ARE A FREAKING GENIUS"

— Agency editor, after Wideframe organized 24 videos in 3 minutes

Under the Hood

How Wideframe actually works

Wideframe is a native Mac desktop app. It runs entirely on Apple Silicon - M1 or later - using the Neural Engine and unified memory for frame-accurate analysis. Your footage never leaves your machine. It indexes your library by meaning, not by filename, and speaks Adobe Premiere Pro natively.

🔍

Semantic Search

Search your footage in plain English. "Interview clips where she mentions the product launch." "Exterior shots at golden hour." It finds them. No tags required, no manual logging first.

🗂

Auto-Organization

Wideframe ingests your raw footage library - across local drives and cloud storage - and builds a structured, labeled, organized project. What used to take a full day takes minutes.

🎬

Native Premiere Output

It reads and writes real .prproj files. No XML exports, no conforming, no broken links. The output drops straight into Premiere Pro with bins, sequences, and timelines intact.

From the Cutting Room Floor

What editors actually say

Our editors save 10 hours a week on footage prep. That's not a minor improvement - that's an extra day of creative work we got back.

- Agency user, early customer

I had 2,500 videos, 500+ audio clips, and 2.5TB of files for my documentary. Wideframe organized all of it in hours. It would have taken me weeks.

- Documentary producer

Who Reaches For It

Built for pros who ship constantly

Ad creative agencies producing dozens of videos per week for clients
Organic social media teams managing high-volume video output across platforms
Documentary filmmakers working with years of raw footage across terabytes of data
Brand in-house video teams where editors wear multiple hats and time is short
Content studios where production speed is the entire business model

Wideframe isn't pitched at hobbyists dabbling in iMovie. The $100/month price and the Apple Silicon requirement signal clearly who this is for: professional editors and agency teams for whom 10 hours per week per editor is not a vanity metric - it's a real cost.

The product's first 75 days told the story: more than 50 brands and agencies were paying customers before most startups have finished their pitch deck revisions.

Many of those customers produce tens or hundreds of videos per week. For them, Wideframe is closer to infrastructure than software.

BUILT WITH: Apple Silicon Neural Engine Anthropic AI Google Gemini On-Device Processing Adobe Premiere API .prproj Native Format

The People Behind It

Two people who lived the problem

Co-Founder & CEO

Daniel Pearson

Before Wideframe, Daniel ran an agency that produced thousands of video ads and managed over $1 billion in growth budget for clients including Uber, DoorDash, and Dropbox - plus 175+ others. He knows exactly how much time agencies lose to footage prep, because he watched it happen for years at scale.

15-year friendship with his co-founder. Built what his editors needed.

Co-Founder & CPTO

Zachary Kim

Zachary is a 2x Y Combinator founder with 20+ years of engineering experience. He's also a photographer with a genuine passion for art history - which, as it turns out, makes you care more about building tools that respect the creative process rather than bulldoze it.

2x YC founder. Photographer. Building the tool that respects the craft.

Philosophy

An AI coworker, not a replacement

There's a version of AI video tools that tries to replace editors: auto-cut your clips, add AI voice, generate B-roll from stock. Wideframe isn't that. It doesn't touch your timeline. It doesn't make creative decisions. It handles the pre-production infrastructure so that when you sit down to edit, you're only making decisions worth making.

The metaphor they use is "assistant editor" - a real role in professional film production, someone who organizes the project, syncs dailies, builds bins and sequences so the editor can focus on storytelling. Wideframe is that, at software speed.

"We built Wideframe to be the assistant editor every editor deserves but most can't afford to hire."

- Wideframe founding philosophy

Track Record

What they've already shipped

Y Combinator Winter 2026 - one of the strongest batches in YC history, with ~196 companies
50+ brands and agencies as paying customers within 75 days of public launch
Runs 100% on-device on Apple Silicon - no footage ever leaves the editor's machine
Native .prproj read/write support - the only AI tool to work directly in Adobe Premiere's file format
Organized 2,500+ videos with 500+ audio clips across 2.5TB+ for a documentary producer in hours
Agencies reporting 10 hours per week per editor in time savings

Timeline

From idea to real traction

2025

Wideframe founded by Daniel Pearson and Zachary Kim - two ex-coworkers and 15-year friends who met working together and had been watching the footage prep problem compound for years.

Early 2026

Selected for Y Combinator Winter 2026 batch. Public launch. The 7-day free trial and $100/month subscription model go live.

2026 - Q1

Within 75 days of launch, more than 50 brands and agencies are paying customers. Editors at multiple agencies report saving 10+ hours per week. A documentary filmmaker uses Wideframe to organize 2.5TB+ of footage that would have taken weeks manually.

Wait, Really?

Things worth knowing about Wideframe

🤝

The two founders have been close friends for 15 years. They were ex-coworkers before they became co-founders. Wideframe is built on a friendship older than most of its future users' professional careers.

🔒

Your footage never leaves your Mac. Everything runs on-device using Apple's Neural Engine. No cloud upload. No data sent to a server. The AI comes to the footage, not the other way around.

📸

Zachary Kim, the CTO, is a photographer with a deep passion for art history. Turns out caring about how images work at a craft level helps when you're building tools to analyze them at scale.

💼

Daniel Pearson, the CEO, previously managed over $1 billion in growth budget across Uber, DoorDash, Dropbox, and 175+ other clients. He's been on the buyer side of bad video workflows his entire career.

🎬

Zachary Kim has founded two Y Combinator companies. This is his third time building something worth backing. The domain expertise this time is different: it's personal.

⚡

The first reaction on record from a paying customer: "OH MY GOD YOU ARE A FREAKING GENIUS" - after watching Wideframe organize 24 videos in 3 minutes. That's a product review, a testimonial, and a validation all at once.