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InVideo's AI pivot bet: near-shutdown in 2022, $70M ARR by 2025
Indian video tool InVideo bets prompts can replace editing skills; $70M ARR by March 2025
InVideo
What the business is
Browser-based video creation SaaS where text prompts generate and edit full videos for creators and small businesses.
Starting capital：$35M in 2021 from Greenoaks, Tiger Global and Peak XV; $53M total raised, with $25M still in the bank by late 2024
How it started
Sanket Shah co-founded InVideo in 2017 in Mumbai (product launched 2019) after seeing video creation was either pro-grade complex or too casual, leaving a gap for businesses and creators in the middle. Backed by Tiger Global and Peak XV, the browser-based editor crossed $20M ARR by 2023 — then growth stalled for roughly 15 months and the company was close to shutting down.
What happened
During the stall, InVideo launched InVideo AI (around August 2023, per Shah): a prompt-to-video product built on rented models rather than an in-house one. It took off among creators — 4 million monthly active users and 7 million videos generated in 30 days by November 2024. ARR climbed from $20M (2023) to $55M (early 2024) to $70M by March 2025, with burn described as minimal.
How it ended up
By March 2025 InVideo was at $70M ARR and one of the largest Indian customers of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and ElevenLabs. It was not actively fundraising despite heavy investor interest; Shah said it still had not reached 'extreme' product-market fit.
Background
InVideo was founded in 2017 in Mumbai by Sanket Shah and co-founders to serve the middle of the video market: people who found Adobe-grade tools too complex and social-media apps too shallow. The browser-based editor launched in 2019 and raised $35M from Greenoaks, Tiger Global and Peak XV in 2021, crossing $20M annual recurring revenue by 2023.
Then growth stopped. For about 15 months revenue was flat and the company was, in Shah's words, on the brink of shutting down. The rescue was a new product: InVideo AI, launched around August 2023, which turns a text prompt into a complete video by stitching together third-party models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and ElevenLabs — the company deliberately never built its own model. By November 2024 it had 4 million monthly active users and had generated 7 million videos in 30 days, with $25M still in the bank.
The result: ARR climbed to $55M in early 2024 and $70M by March 2025, making InVideo one of the largest Indian customers of the very model labs it rents from. Despite the milestone, Shah said the company was not actively raising and still chasing what he called extreme product-market fit.
What has to be true
- Video demand from creators and small businesses was exploding while pro tools stayed complex and expensive.
- Renting frontier models made a full-text-to-video product possible without a research budget.
- A prompt-based interface removed the editing skill that had kept casual users away.
- Freemium pricing plus viral creator use drove organic adoption and kept burn low.
What can be applied
A stalled product can be replaced, not just improved: InVideo swapped a learnable editor for a promptable AI pipeline, and renting others' models kept the pivot cheap.
Aftermath
As of March 2025, InVideo was at $70M ARR, had 4M+ monthly active users and was not actively fundraising despite investor interest, per CEO Sanket Shah. Its v3.0 release in November 2024 had added prompt-driven video generation with per-minute pricing, and the company remained focused on what Shah called extreme product-market fit rather than further capital.
Sources
- Tiger Global-backed InVideo launches GenAI-based video creation
- Inside InVideo's $70 million ARR growth story
- Invideo Lets You Generate Full-Length Videos Using AI or Stock Footage
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