ChatCut, a United States-based conversational artificial intelligence (AI) video editing platform, has closed a $1.35 million seed round led by China’s ZhenFund with participation from Singapore’s Antler.

ChatCut said in a statement on Wednesday that the seed funding will accelerate the firm’s product development and team expansion in the coming months.

The company plans to enhance its capabilities and invest in scaling its infrastructure to support growing global user demand.

It is also expanding its engineering team, with a focus on hiring artificial intelligence (AI) and full-stack engineers to drive continued innovation.

With this round of investment, the team is committed to improving the platform and making it even more useful for editors, producers, creators, and marketers everywhere.

“Backing ChatCut at the inception stage made perfect sense,

“The team had the right mix of technical curiosity and storytelling craft. Seeing how fast they’ve translated that into real traction, happy customers, and now institutional backing is exactly why we do what we do, to help exceptional founders turn creative conviction into global products,” said Erik Jonsson, Partner at Antler.

Winnie Khoo, Partner at Antler, said GenAI has crossed into everyday marketing and product work.

“ChatCut translates that capability into outcomes teams can publish today,

“The next step, and what this round enables, is pushing that experience into more formats, more integrations, and more markets,” she added.

ChatCut is an AI-native video editor built for creators working with unscripted spoken content — especially long interviews and talking-head videos.

Instead of wrestling with timelines, users describe the outcome they want and ChatCut assembles a draft cut in minutes.

It turns conversations into watch-ready narratives for YouTube, podcasts, courses, webinars, and internal comms — with a focus on clarity, speed, and story.

“We’re democratizing editing capabilities and enabling world-class editing judgment into an intelligent agent anyone can access through conversation,

“For teams, that means faster outcomes; for newcomers, it means editing is no longer a barrier to publishing,” said ChatCut’s Co-founder Alima Strickland.

It is noted that as video becomes the default language of the internet, AI-assisted editing is moving from niche plug-ins to end-to-end “copilot” workflows.

ChatCut’s Conversational AI frees up time for creative experiments, cutting down manual search across hundreds of gigabytes of footage and contextually putting together the first draft of a long-form video.

The firm sees growing demand for faster publishing cycles and consistent brand quality.

It noted that enterprises are also standardizing on AI tools to reduce manual review rounds and localize content at scale.

“The team’s experience in content creation gives them an unfair advantage: they're building for users they truly understand,

“Combined with their ability to leverage AI and move at lightning speed, they represent the future of AI-native entrepreneurship,” said Yuan Liu, Managing Partner at ZhenFund.

Antler doubles down on AI with $7.4M in early-stage funding across SEA