Cardboard Hires Core Engineering Team Following Y Combinator W26 Batch

Video editing software has historically run as heavy desktop applications, constrained by local compute and complex manual timelines. Cardboard, a San Francisco-based startup founded in 2025 and backed by Y Combinator's W26 batch with $500,000 in seed funding, is taking a different approach: building an agentic video editor running natively inside the browser.

Designed for growth teams, marketing operations, and high-cadence creators, Cardboard allows users to upload source footage and specify instructions—such as generating 30-second hooks, creating testimonial cuts, adjusting pacing, or stripping dead silences. The platform then returns an initial edit directly in the browser that teams can refine through natural-language prompts or manual timeline control.

Now, the two-person company is hiring five technical and design roles across Bengaluru and San Francisco to build out its media infrastructure, browser rendering engine, and multimodal machine learning pipelines.

Building a Non-Linear Editor in the Browser

Cardboard relies on two recent architectural shifts: the browser-level availability of WebGPU and WebCodecs, alongside advances in multimodal vision-language models capable of temporal and visual reasoning across footage.

Speaking in an interview with Fondo, co-founder and CEO Saksham Aggarwal described the software as "like Cursor, but for video editing." Rather than functioning as a plugin inside existing desktop editors like Final Cut Pro, Cardboard builds its own browser-based non-linear editor (NLE) from scratch. In the interview, Aggarwal explained that different types of video require specialized AI pipelines: "To understand stream recordings, we need like different kind of ML pipeline. To understand talking head videos, to understand sports videos, it requires different kind of AI models. So we have like this routing model which inside sort of routes the relevant queries to like relevant kind of ML pipelines."

A demonstration on HowToHarbor shows users interacting with an AI "director" sidebar, typing instructions to adjust transition styles, alter voiceovers, and grade colors across clips in natural language without manually dialing sliders or splicing timeline items.

Cardboard's target users include growth and marketing teams shipping product videos, as well as software engineers building demos. Teams at companies such as PostHog, Hyperspell, and Autumn AI have used the tool, according to Aggarwal in the Fondo interview, which followed a launch campaign that reached roughly 500,000 views across Twitter and LinkedIn.

Technical Founders with Systems Experience

Cardboard was founded by childhood friends Saksham Aggarwal and Ishan Sharma, who met in school 15 years ago.

Aggarwal, who serves as CEO, studied computer science at BITS Pilani. He previously co-founded Iterate AI (backed by Entrepreneur First), conducted AI evaluations research published at ACL, worked as the first engineer at PYOR, and managed growth at Flint.

Sharma, who serves as CTO, spent four and a half years as an engineer at HackerRank leading web applications, working on performance-critical and memory-heavy systems in the browser. Before attending Chitkara University, he built Hotspoter, a Windows networking tool that surpassed 5.7 million downloads.

Engineering and Evaluation Roles Open Across Two Hubs

To expand its rendering core and multimodal architecture, Cardboard is hiring five roles across Bengaluru and San Francisco.

On the model performance side, Cardboard is recruiting a Senior Applied ML Engineer, Evals & Data in Bengaluru. The engineer will study real production runs, convert agent failures into benchmark cases, and implement offline and online evaluation suites to establish quality baselines.

The media pipeline requires backend stability for heavy video workloads. The team is hiring a Backend Engineer in Bengaluru to own video exports, proxies, media preprocessing, and long-running analysis workflows while managing state contracts between the browser, workers, databases, and object storage.

In the browser client, Cardboard is recruiting an entry-level Fullstack Engineer in Bengaluru to build real-time editing, playback mechanisms, and full-stack services. For graphics rendering, Cardboard is hiring a senior Founding Design Engineer split between Bengaluru and San Francisco to build animations and core rendering features using WebGL, GSAP, Framer Motion, and Three.js while optimizing browser memory consumption on large source media.

Cardboard is also searching for a mid-level Founding Designer in Bengaluru or San Francisco, offering an annual salary of ₹3,000,000 to ₹6,000,000. The role owns UI, product flows, interactive prototypes, and the core design system.

Open Roles at Cardboard

See all open roles at Cardboard