Jellysmack Acquires Video-Editing Startup Kamua

colorful Kamua lizard logo and Jellysmack's Jellyfish logo over a merge traffic sign to symbolize acquisition

In late November 2021, Jellysmack finalized its first acquisition: an AI-powered video editing technology company called Kamua. The strategic investment is expected to significantly optimize operations around a key component of Jellysmack’s long-term vision.  

That vision is predicated on scaling the creator economy by finding new audiences across various social media platforms. Presently, video editing and reformatting is a considerable part of the company’s process.

As part of the deal, Kamua’s Romanian-based engineering team has been integrated into Jellysmack’s technology and product teams. Kamua CEO Paul Robert Cary has accepted a position at Jellysmack as Vice President of Automagical Editing Technology. 

How fitting then, that Kamua was acquired by Jellysmack, who would go on to become Fast Company’s Most Innovative Company in the Video category for 2022.

Kamua’s phenomenal success codifies Romania’s growing recognition as an epicenter of premium engineering talent. The platform Kamua built, which was barely two years old at the time of acquisition, rivaled those of tech giants like Google and Adobe who have also developed machine learning solutions to expedite video editing.

Creating content is a resource intensive process. Adding to the challenge, the requirements for content formatting, length, dimensions, and pacing vary from platform to platform. What works on YouTube won’t necessarily translate to TikTok or Facebook without significant, time-intensive work.

Kamua’s video editing software caters to this specific but pervasive challenge by enabling the user to centrally edit videos by social platform. The user can move a pre-sized, platform-tailored frame around the video to capture the key focal frames. 

Perhaps the most cutting-edge feature of Kamua’s video editing solution is the way it leverages computer vision to partially automate the editing process. 

One of the product’s core capabilities is auto-detecting the primary focal point of the video and following it. This sophisticated feature keeps the star in the spotlight of the frame with impressive accuracy. That makes reformatting videos nearly fully automated, leaving editors to step in and polish the final output and add interesting cuts where they see fit.

In addition to its computer vision features, Kamua’s video editing and processing is entirely cloud based via fast GPUs. That means utilizing the program is both efficient and not dependent on a local device’s computing power. 

By reducing the workload of tailoring video formats for every platform’s dimensions, Jellysmack’s army of video editors will be freed up to include more editorial touches to every video they handle, as well as process a higher number of videos per day.

Presently, Jellysmack’s team of video editors work on approximately 10,000 videos per month, amounting to more than 150,000 hours of video editing.  That includes Jellysmack’s in-house produced content for its numerous owned-and-operated verticals including Beauty Studio and Oh My Goal. Jellysmack also works on the content libraries of creator partners to adapt their videos for multiple platforms. This includes YouTube’s créme de la créme creators such as MrBeast, PewDiePie, Smitha Deepak, NasDaily, and Kendall Rae. 

Jellysmack’s creator partnership program increased its roster by 5x in 2021, significantly bolstering the volume of high quality, audience approved content in the pipeline. High potential creator partners are routinely identified by Jellysmack’s machine learning creator detection tool, which assesses cross-platform opportunities to scale across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. 

Kamua’s groundbreaking machine learning and computer vision video editing technology is the latest addition to Jellysmack’s robust suite of tools developed specifically to expedite creator editing and scale audiences. Kamua’s integration into Jellysmack’s techstack is expected to improve video editing times by as much as 75%, significantly reducing time spent per video.

The Kamua acquisition is Jellysmack’s first since its founding in 2016. The deal comes just six months after the company’s successful Series C funding round with SoftBank, which was finalized in May 2021. Though the exact details of the investment are not being made public, the company has shared that Softbank’s investment pushed it to reach the coveted ‘unicorn’ status, a designation reserved for startups with valuations of $1 billion or more.

As a pioneer in the creator economy, Jellysmack is always on the lookout for solutions to challenges creators face in scaling their operations. 

Kamua’s state-of-the-art video editing solution will be an efficiency-focused complement to Jellysmack’s suite of data-centric technology and machine learning tools of unique performance analytics, data-based content strategy recommendations, and hands-off audience development services. 

Between running its owned and operated verticals as well as partnering with established creators looking to expand into new horizons, reducing the time it takes to edit videos at scale has direct favorable implications on the company’s vision of shaping the future of the creator economy. 

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