OZU builds models and products that help people see and capture the world like a filmmaker.
We're a remote-first video AI startup based in Brooklyn NY and backed by angels, VCs, and entrepreneurs from Figma, Atlassian, Runway, NVIDIA, and Maximum Effort.
We Value
Film and Videomaking Craft
We believe in the wisdom of the experts that craft stories for film, tv, and streaming. Their techniques and knowledge guide our innovations.
Creative Flow
We love the feeling we get while making - especially when we care deeply about what we're making. We design our tools to enter, enhance and maintain that state of creative flow.
Long-form Visual Storytelling
Why can't the photo album of the future be an episodic series? That's the future we want to manifest. We value long-form visual storytelling and want to help make it a mainstream skill.
We're long-time computational cinema nerds obsessed with building creative tools. We love real-time video, creative flow, and think there's so much more that can be unlocked by technology.
We trained and deployed our own ML models to understand cinematography and editing. We launched projects for HBO and Michael Kors, like connecting HBO's episodic archives to cameras and video walls so users could move and speak and see matching shots playback from HBO's library; and turning a live Michael Kors runway show into 400 edited videos with individual Final Cut Pro project files ready to go so editors could fine tune them.
We released the Precorder - a Mac App for running OZU models locally on Apple Silicon to turn huge video archives into structured data. With it, users could take 1000 hours of video, and in a couple days, without spending money on compute, they could search through, edit with, and create videos from their archive.
We demoed the Precorder in Feb 2023 live at Figma AI in NYC which led to a new round of founding and design partners. More demos at events and gatherings across the city helped us recruit new users and confirm the power and potential of blending real-time video search, editing, and curation across massive video libraries.
Our latest product is for a wider audience and is live in closed beta now. It's an AI video player in the browser, designed to work with Precorded video. OZU lets people playback, search, share, and curate video in a whole new way. All sorts of users, thinking aloud with video.