Jonathan Chung (CEO) and Alex Ha (COO) both scaled Altos-backed consumer app MyRealTrip to $1.6B monthly GMV with 42% YoY growth. Jonathan led Material Design at Google, designing for over a billion users. Alex is Oxford-trained, ex-Bain, and a product vet.

They left to build Hinoki. It generates first-cut edits from raw footage using plain English commands, applying instructions like "speed up the intro" directly into timeline edits. They claim to cut assembly time - one of the largest bottlenecks for the content creation market - by 70%.

They hold a patent on their NLP-to-timeline engine, which is trained on professional video datasets. Still, in a market crowded with increasingly simplified UIs for text-to-video, incl. OpusClip ($50M), VEED.IO ($35M), and Descript ($103.7M), the execution quality will have to speak for itself.

The AI video editing market is projected to nearly double to $12.4B by 2030. And while today most tools are built by engineers for editors, Hinoki's applying consumer product thinking to prosumer workflows wins with top-tier design chops, co-founder chemistry, at a time when NLP finally works.