How Did 65 People Create the World’s Fastest-Growing AI Video Startup?

Top 3 Things in Today’s Latestly AI Edition

• Saudi just dropped a $40B AI war chest, the largest AI fund in human history and they’re courting a16z to deploy it.

• OpenAI quietly tested “Swarm v2”, a multi-agent system that acts like a digital workforce 

• DeepMind’s new SIMA controls 25+ AAA games using only natural language, meaning AI can now play complex 3D worlds like a human

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AI STORY OF THE WEEK

Meet Sanket Shah, From Survival Mode to Building India’s $1B AI Video Powerhouse

In 2021, InVideo looked like a win on paper: $53M raised, millions of users, global recognition.

Reality?
15 months of flat revenue, ballooning burn, and no path out.

The company was inches from collapse. Instead of dying quietly, Sanket triggered a full mindset reset.

In August 2023, he and a tiny team did what most VC-backed founders never dare:
a total product pivot from online video editing → InVideo AI.

And that changed everything.

By 2025:
$70M ARR, users in 190+ countries, and the fastest-growing AI video platform in India. Built by a team of just 65.

Their edge?
Speed + simplicity + a laser-focused use-case that Adobe and Canva were too slow to chase.

What’s InVideo Doing?

• Zero Skill → Polished Video

  InVideo AI transforms video creation into a fully automated pipeline. Users can input an idea or prompt, and the system generates a complete, studio-quality video including script, visuals, scene sequencing, transitions, and voiceover. No editing skills or production experience are required.

• AI Twins (New 2025 Feature)

  Its most significant 2025 update, AI Twins, allows individuals and brands to create personalized video avatars that can deliver content on command across multiple languages and formats. Instead of recording footage, users generate new videos by prompting their AI clone.

• Built for the Underserved

  The product is specifically optimized for independent creators, small teams, and early-stage businesses: segments traditionally underserved by tools designed for professional editors or enterprise studios.

Why It Matters?

1. Second Chances Are Real

   IInVideo’s online editor had plateaued for over a year. The pivot toward AI video automation directly addressed the core user complaint: even simplified editors still required too much manual work.

2. AI Is Flattening Content Production

   By automating scripting, timing, narration, and editing, InVideo eliminated the skill and cost barriers that previously limited global adoption.

3. Small Teams > Big Corporations

   With only ~65 employees, InVideo shipped features faster than competitors with 10–100× larger teams, an advantage in a market where speed determines adoption.

Lessons for Founders

• Address the real bottleneck, not the trend.

  The pivot was driven by user friction not by chasing the generative AI hype cycle.

• Operational discipline matters more than headcount.

  InVideo’s velocity came from a compact team with clear ownership, enabling rapid experimentation and iteration.

• “Mature” categories can still be disrupted by new technical leverage.

  Video editing was considered solved; full-stack AI automation reopened the space entirely.What to Watch:

What to Watch Next?

• Can InVideo sustain growth against Adobe and Canva?

  If AI Twins and prompt-based video creation become mainstream, InVideo has a structural advantage but moderation, accuracy, and scaling challenges remain.

• Will AI-generated avatars become standard for digital brands?

  Early adoption suggests this could replace traditional video workflows for a large percentage of online creators.

• Will InVideo continue independent growth or raise a large round to compete globally?

  At $70M ARR, both paths are strategically viable.

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GLOBAL AI NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

The Most Important AI Developments Happening Now : Region by Region

🌎 Americas

1. OpenAI – Quietly tested “Swarm v2” agent architecture capable of running persistent multi-agent teams, hinting at deeper automation beyond GPT-5. Big deal because it signals OpenAI is preparing real agent ecosystems, not just chatbots.

2. Sanctuary AI (Canada) revealed Phoenix-A1 robot completing warehouse picking tasks autonomously, beating its previous benchmark by 3×. Shows humanoids are now replacing repetitive labor, not just demoing tricks.

3. NVIDIA finalized acquisition of Run:ai for $700M, locking down orchestration for massive training clusters. This strengthens NVIDIA’s chokehold on AI infrastructure even further.

4. HuggingFace launched “Inference at the Edge”, letting developers deploy models on smartphones and micro-devices. This pushes generative AI offline — huge for privacy and latency.

🌍 Europe

1. France approved €800M funding for European foundational models, including Mistral and Aleph Alpha. Europe is finally putting real money behind independent LLMs.

2. DeepMind released SIMA update, enabling game-general agents to control 25+ AAA titles through natural language. This is the closest thing we have to universal digital agents.

3. Stability AI rolled out “Stable Audio Open 1.0”, the first fully open audio-generation model with commercial rights. Open-source is catching up in multimodal domains.

4. UK’s CMA announced new regulation for AI compute concentration, targeting NVIDIA and Microsoft. Regulators are officially treating GPUs like strategic assets.

🌏 Middle East

1. Saudi Arabia announced a $40B AI megafund in partnership conversations with Andreessen Horowitz. This could reshape global investment flows overnight.

2. Dubai deployed AI traffic-flow management agents city-wide, cutting peak congestion by 28%. Real-world agent deployment at national scale.

3. Qatar launched its own Arabic LLM (Jassam 2) optimized for government + enterprise use. Finally challenges Western dominance in Arabic language AI.

4. Israel’s AI21 Labs released “Jamba 1.1”, now capable of long-form reasoning with a hybrid transformer-MoE mix. A direct competitor to GPT-4-level reasoning.

🌏 Asia-Pacific

1. Tencent debuted Hunyuan 2.0, surpassing GPT-4 in several Chinese benchmarks. China doubling down on domestic frontier models.

2. Japan’s Preferred Networks showed a robotics demo with 40+ tasks automated, beating Toyota’s internal benchmark. Japan is quietly leading practical robotics.

3. South Korea invested $900M into national AI chip manufacturing, targeting NVIDIA replacement. A strategic push to break GPU dependence.

4. ByteDance launched “Coze Open Agents” globally, giving devs a zero-code agent builder. TikTok’s parent is entering the agent wars.

🌍 Africa

1. South Africa’s Lelapa AI released Vulavula 3, a multilingual speech-to-text model for 11 African languages. Fills a massive gap ignored by big US labs.

2. Nigeria approved its first national AI policy, focused on education, healthcare, and local startups. A foundational step for continent-wide adoption.

3. Egypt’s InstaDeep trained an AI model for predicting crop diseases, reducing prediction time by 70%. AI agriculture is becoming a real African strength.

4. Kenya launched an AI-powered land registry system, cutting fraud by 90% in pilot regions. One of the most practical governance applications in the world.

🌏 Oceania

1. Australia funded its first national GPU cluster for startups, offering 3,000 H100 equivalents. Huge because access to compute has been the region’s biggest bottleneck.

2. Canva launched “Canva Agents” beta for automated design workflows. Signals that design AI is moving from tools → autonomous assistants.

3. UneeQ (NZ) unveiled next-gen AI avatars with photoreal emotional expressiveness. This pushes digital human interfaces closer to customer-facing reality.

4. CSIRO released a 400B-token multilingual dataset for research use. Rare government-level support for open data.

This Week’s Top 5 AI Startup Fundraising Rounds

Top 10 AI Unicorns — This Week’s Move

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