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For Prajwal Prakash, Akash Anand, and Neel Balar, lessons from a venture that didn’t take off the ground led to the start of another startup.

Their first startup, Desklamp, a note-sharing tool for students and researchers that they launched from college—IIT Madras—failed to monetise. Following feedback from YCombinator’s programme on the startup’s feasibility, the founders decided to adopt a new direction.

They found their new goal in instructional videos and set out to build Clueso, a startup that creates videos and documentation for SaaS companies. The Bengaluru-based startup was part of YourStory’s Tech30 2024, which is an annual list of 30 most promising Indian startups that are poised to become major disruptors across fields.

A part of many companies’ learning materials and explainers, these how-to guides show the step-by-step process of any task.

How Clueso works?

The startup helps companies create instructional videos from raw footage.

“A user records a base stream recording of your product feature demo and Clueso converts it into a studio quality video with your company branding, Zoom effects, good animations and an AI generated audio track that syncs perfectly with your video,” explains Prakash.

The raw audio that a user uploads serves as the base for all our intelligence, explains Prakash. “This audio gets transcribed, refactored with large language models and then we have an engine that converts that text into speech. That’s the whole pipeline for audio and video effects.”

Additionally, the company also generates articles based on the transcribed speech and generates the content in around 30 languages.

The company has also built a real-time video editor on the web, which tackles the minute details such as speeding up certain segments of the video or slowing them down.

With automations and good rendering engines added to the mix, the co-founder believes that the company is an AI heavy tech company, even though that was never the explicit goal.

Video editing has often been associated with Adobe Premiere Pro and iMovies but things are now changing.

“Video editing through a web browser is extremely new because even up to two to three years ago, the web was just not mature enough for this. The kind of functionalities you need your browser to be able to support to get real-time feedback on editing just weren’t there,” explains the co-founder.

“But there are new APIs for rendering videos on the web, and we’re at the forefront of trying to do that…that has been a big challenge because even we don’t know what exactly is going to be possible on the browser” he adds.

The product is currently available as a subscription on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis. The amount varies depending on the size of the customer and amount of video required in the interval. For example, the startup’s base plan is $200 per month for 60 minutes of video exported per month with four seats of access.

“Our contracts vary from $2000 per year all the way to $30000 per year,” he adds.

The company caters to product marketers, and customer education teams at SaaS companies, as well as larger organisations which need to educate their employees on internal software, the co-founder says.

Combining the web editing with UX, the company also provides access to users to make edits on the edited video if need be.

The big idea

“The big moment for us came when in our hostel, there were two roommates who tried DeskLamp on the same day. One really loved it, and the other had no idea what to do. It was because the first person explained to him how to use it, he had some idea,” says Prajwal Prakash, co-founder, Clueso.

Having faced this challenge in educating users about the software, the co-founders had made a video explaining the same, “…it was so painful and it took a week just to make the video. We had to get our friend to design it for us, got another to do voice acting for us, and came up with the whole script,” he adds.

While the process was tedious, the results were promising. Having learnt the importance, the co-founders echoed the sentiment that this was a problem worth solving because “every software company has it.”

The B2B company says that being backed by YC helped them connect with decision makers at bigger companies despite being ‘straight out of college.’

“We were able to talk to leading software companies, understand how their video making workflow, and article making workflow really is and if it is a big enough pain point for them,” says Prakash.

As for the name of the startup, the founders say they were inspired by Inspector Clouseau of the Pink Panther.

Funding and future

The Y Combinator-backed company says that it had raised about $1 million in seed funding after YC, making the total funding to $1.5 million.

Around 200 organisations currently use Clueso, including 20 global unicorns such as MoEngage, HighRadius, Darwinbox, Personio, Altana, MovableInk, Exotel, and Capillary Technologies. Having been profitable for six months and a runway of 36 months, the company is not actively seeking funding anytime soon. The company projects a revenue of $1 million for FY25.

Prakash sees Synthesia as Clueso’s competitor, “however they are into video generation and we are into video editing,” he adds.

According to Straits Research, the global video creation tools market was valued at $599.8 million in 2023 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.9%, reaching $1.292 billion by 2032.

The company aims to automate this process of video creation as much as possible and in the next five years, “people look back at what, even what Clueso is today and think, I can’t believe people used to make videos that way,” the co-founder concludes.