Osmo Studio has officially launched and announced a $5 million seed round, led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Basis Set Ventures, MVP Ventures, Collaborative Fund, investor Scott Belsky, and others.

The company was co-founded by Chris He, Will Hoppin, Oleksandr Shevenionov, and Basil Alfaro — a team with backgrounds spanning A24, NBC, and Saturday Night Live. Bain Capital Ventures' Amanda Huang is leading the firm's investment.

The Problem Osmo Is Solving

As AI has driven the cost of producing video toward zero, the bottleneck in storytelling has shifted. It's no longer about production capacity — it's about who controls what the story actually says. Most AI video tools are built to optimize for volume: more clips, produced faster. Osmo starts from a different premise — that AI should accelerate production while leaving the storyteller in control of the point of view.

Editable Code, Not Fixed Output

Rather than generating a finished, static video, Osmo produces animations as editable code. Storytellers can bring in a Figma file, frontend code, an image, or a reference video, then adjust text, colors, timing, movement, layers, and vectors using plain language. The company describes the approach as pairing the accessibility of Canva with the power of Adobe — AI builds the animation, but every layer, curve, and frame stays editable and on-brand.

Built by Filmmakers, for Filmmakers

Osmo's founders didn't start by building software — they started by making films. Over their first seven months, the team operated as a working film studio, producing more than 50 films for companies including Cognition, First Round, and Andera. That hands-on production experience directly shaped the product they eventually shipped.

Today, teams at Webflow, Resend, Rho, and Gumloop use Osmo, with the company citing video production speeds up to 32.7x faster than After Effects — without sacrificing creative control.

Backers Who Watched It From the Start

Bain Capital Ventures' Amanda Huang described the founding team as a rare combination of creative genius and technical skill, pointing to the work Osmo's team has already produced for companies like Cognition, PI, and Parallel Web Systems as evidence of the intensity behind the product.

MVP Ventures, another participant in the round, noted its relationship with CEO Chris He predates Osmo's founding, having stayed close through the company's seven-month bootstrap period — offering feedback on positioning, customer introductions, and narrative as the business plan took shape.

Investors see the team as well-positioned to compete in the roughly $40 billion creative software market, betting that AI-native tools built by working creatives — not just engineers — are the ones best equipped to earn the trust of professional storytellers.

Learn more at osmo.inc.