Building a smarter workflow for short-form video creators

This article is a part of Startup Spotlight, a series that features young, up-and-coming startups.

Photo credit: Victoria Kravchenko

Viktoriia Kravchenko wanted to share her story but found video creation too complicated. Building a personal brand is valuable, but technical editing hurdles hold many back. She launched Verba to automate video workflows and offer performance insights.

😟 Problem

Creators and small businesses must publish consistently across platforms like TikTok and YouTube to grow. The primary bottleneck happens after filming. Manually cutting footage, formatting captions, cleaning audio, and translating content makes the process slow, expensive, and inconsistent.

Even after all that work, creators often don’t know why one video performs well and another doesn’t, so they lack clear feedback on what to improve next.

💡 Solution

Verba streamlines the post-production workflow for creators and small businesses, including: 

• AI smart captions transcribe speech into styled subtitles.
• An automated editor cuts raw footage and structures short-form videos.
• Additional tools handle voiceovers, translation, and audio enhancement.
• An upcoming performance layer uses analytics to improve future content.

Image credit: Verba

📊 Market size

The startup currently averages roughly US$67 in annual revenue per paying customer. At that rate, 100,000 paying customers would represent roughly US$6.7 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), and one million paying customers would represent roughly US$67 million.

🤝 Team

• Viktoria Kravchenko. Co-founder and CEO. She leads product and growth, leveraging her background in software and content creation.
• Oleksandr Kravchenko. Co-founder and CTO. He previously contributed to photo and video editing products at scale at Bending Spoons. 

🚀 Traction

• The platform has amassed over 30,000 paying customers.
• Users export more than 250,000 videos through the app every month.
• The startup was selected for the Techstars Tokyo 2026 cohort.
• An upcoming analytical layer rolls out to 1,000 iOS creators in November.

🏆 Competition

The startup competes with AI video editors like Captions, OpusClip, Submagic, and Descript. The platform differentiates itself by utilizing on-device AI for faster, localized processing. The software will soon use video performance data to automate future editing decisions.

💰 Financials

Verba operates on a paid subscription model, generating more than US$2 million in ARR. The startup is profitable and, aside from Techstars funding, has not raised external equity.

🚩 Risks