A San Francisco startup is using AI to help businesses create marketing, launch, and other videos—without just generating unexciting “AI slop.”
Osmo Studio, which bills itself as a “storytelling studio with a software factory” rather than a pure tech business, announced on Wednesday the general availability of its signature product, which generate short videos based on existing customer assets, including fonts, logos, product images, videos, and assets stored on platforms like Figma. The goal, says cofounder and CEO Chris He, is to enable marketers, sales staff, and other users to keep up with the breakneck pace of Silicon Valley launches without sacrificing the human element of storytelling.
“No amount of technology has ever written a good story,” He says.
Users can instruct the software on how to build the video using standard AI prompts, but they can also ask the AI to expose configuration options for the video including colors, animation speeds, and even blur and simulated film grain effects. Unlike some other AI video editing tools that force users to repeatedly regenerate video based on evolving prompts, Osmo focuses heavily on AI generating code, including things like JavaScript, CSS, and SVG graphics.
That lets the tool harness a proven strength of the frontier models it relies upon while providing an easy basis for iterative tweaks, without requiring users to have experience writing code or working with traditional video tools. Users can even ask the AI to tweak generated audio, like swapping out one genre of music for another in a backing track, while keeping other elements of the tune the same. Visually, a built-in design element library also helps maintain a minimum level of quality, even when users aren’t relying heavily on their own assets, He says.
And the heavy support for customization, along with the easy integration with existing assets enabled by the code-based approach, helps users maintain authorship and creative control even while producing videos in a fraction of the time it would take to create them fully from scratch.
“You can also use Osmo to create custom controls to adjust the padding, change the type, whatever you want,” He says. “It’s almost like applying a lot of the principles of web technology and website development to video.”
When users are done, they can export their work from Osmo in standard video formats, ready to post online or tweak with other tools. In some cases, He says, users create animation layers in Osmo that they can quickly layer on top of other videos, like adding relevant illustrations to a talking-head style discussion. Other customers have harnessed the technology for presentation intros and outros, social media content, and even music videos. As of August 5, customers wishing to use the AI can sign up for plans ranging from $19 to $130 per month based on usage.
Aron Korenblit, the head of community and education at AI workplace automation startup Gumloop, says he’s been making educational videos about software for years but finds Osmo unlocks editing capabilities he wouldn’t be able to achieve with traditional software.
“I don’t want to say it saves me a ton of time, because what I do in Osmo would be otherwise impossible for me,” Korenblit says.
Korenblit is able to use Osmo to create animations illustrating concepts he’s discussing, at times having the AI generate simplified versions of real-world software interfaces based on actual HTML. Osmo is able to generate controls letting him adjust arbitrary features of the animation, from bounce effects to included images, without the need to write code, and can then merge the animations with other video layers, like Korenblit’s on-camera discussions and screen-recorded demonstrations. That level of control, he says, makes Osmo better suited to his needs than AI tools that simply generate video from scratch.
“I’m not relying on the AI to give me inspiration,” he says. “It’s more that I want Osmo to be that kind of interpretation layer where I have something in my mind, I explain it, and it just writes the code that creates the animation and the layouts, and maybe a little bit of the editing.”
Osmo recently announced a $5 million funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Other investors include Basis Set Ventures, MVP Ventures, Collaborative Fund, and Scott Belsky. From the start, He tells Fast Company, the company has also worked closely with customers to make short videos for product launches. “We probably ran, I think, about 50-plus launch films in the first four months,” he says.
The company’s cofounders have a mix of technical and creative expertise: CTO Will Hoppin previously worked in technical roles at A24 and NBCUniversal, for example, and the company will likely continue to operate its own studio for the foreseeable future, says CEO He. Though venture-backed startups sometimes shy away from focusing too heavily on project work for individual customers, Osmo’s founders see that in-house production experience as critical to its essence and the AI product’s development. The company even showcases a kind of sizzle reel on its website.
“You can’t automate something until you know how to how it works, and you can’t know how it works until you’ve done it 100 times to the point where it’s like the back of your hand,” He says.