About Ponder

Ponder is Cursor for Video Editing.

We want to use AI to edit every type of content (YouTube videos, short-form content, movies, etc.). This is extremely challenging, but it's recently become possible through advancements in multimodal and video understanding.

We are a small group of deeply technical engineers, creative technologists, and filmmakers based in New York City crafting a video creation tool for creative professionals.

Founded by Timothy Wang (creative technologist @ITP, exited founder & filmmaker) and Tim Tan (full-stack engineer, YouTuber, ex-Amazon, Karat, and graduate of Georgia Tech)

Our mission is to make creating video lightning fast, with creative control. We raised $2.5M from top VCs to do so.

We're backed by Sunflower Capital (Clay, Vercel, Posthog, Tabular, Ollama, Cohere, etc.), Aaron Levie (CEO of Box), Matt Hartman (the first investor of Hugging Face), Emery Wells (founder of Frame.io, who exited to Adobe for $1.4B), Joshua Browder, Ben Pasternak (Believe, Simulate), and many other institutional investors, filmmakers, and creators.

More on our story **here.**

Thesis

Most “AI video” tools today generate novelty, not real workflows. We’re not interested in gimmicks.

We’re starting with manipulation of real video, not just generation.

That means:

• Automatic rough cut generation
• Smart clip suggestions and context-aware shot replacement
• Video inpainting, audio-aware trimming, AI b-roll replacement
• Multimodal interfaces: cut, modify, and iterate via transcript, language, visuals
• A real-time collaboration layer that feels magical and doesn’t break

The long-term goal: build the best agentic system for editing — where users describe what they want and the system helps shape it. The feeling should be fast, fluid, and full of intent.

What You’ll Actually Do