VEED

Sabba Keynejad grew up with significant dyslexia — held back three years trying to pass his English GCSE — and found video editing tools just as impenetrable as the text they made him struggle with. A design graduate from the University of the Arts London, he spent two years failing as a freelancer and a YouTuber before meeting Timur Mamedov, a computer science graduate and part-time graffiti artist, at a global hackathon. Together they built the first version of VEED in 2018: upload a video, add text, crop, done. No download. No manual. No expertise required. They applied to Y Combinator twice and got rejected both times. They ran out of money, lost their office, watched their developers quit, and kept going anyway — Timur working a contract job and splitting his salary with Sabba so they could keep building. From that wreckage of 2019, Sabba shifted from product to distribution: 160 Quora answers, 30 blog posts targeting hyper-specific search queries, 30 lo-fi YouTube tutorials. Traffic compounded. By 2021 they had crossed $6M ARR, profitable, bootstrapped, and still without a single investor.

In February 2022, Sequoia Capital invested $35M — the firm's first major UK check after opening its London office — calling VEED "the future of video" and praising Sabba and Timur's deep empathy for the creator community. That empathy has since produced one of the most comprehensively stocked video editing platforms at this price point: auto-subtitles in 50+ languages, AI avatars, video translation with lip-sync, eye contact correction, filler word removal, magic cut, brand kits, screen recording, AI text-to-speech, and, since October 2025, a full AI Playground with Google Veo 3.1 Fast and OpenAI Sora 2 for text-to-video generation — all accessible from a browser tab, all usable by someone who has never edited a video in their life. VEED hit $45M ARR in October 2025, serves 10 million monthly active users, has 25,000 paying customers including 76% of the Fortune 500, and just launched VEED Fabric 1.0 — described as the world's first AI talking video model — generating 1-minute videos at 60x lower cost and 7x faster than competing solutions. They got rejected from YC. They built a unicorn anyway.