Kino AI (YC S23) opened its standalone editor to everyone on November 4, 2026 — footage storage, a code-first timeline built on Remotion, and browser review links, with coding agents like Claude Code and Codex cutting alongside you. It edits and organizes footage; it does not repurpose or publish the finished cut.
2026-11-04 · by Moe Ameen
On November 4, 2026, Kino AI — a Y Combinator Summer 2023 company — posted its Launch HN introducing a standalone "AI media manager and video editor." Kino combines footage and asset storage, a video editor, and browser-based review links in one place, and its defining idea is that humans and AI coding agents work on the same timeline at once. The team demoed agents such as Claude Code and Codex placing clips and making edits alongside a human editor in real time.
Kino is "code-first": edits, motion graphics, timeline changes, comments, and even 3D scenes are expressed as code, built on the Remotion framework. That is what lets an agent operate the timeline the way a person does — and because everything in Kino has a URL (projects, clips, individual frames, comments), an agent can be pointed at a specific moment rather than guessing. The editor runs as a desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux (built on WebCodecs and the Mediabunny library), scrubs original footage locally, and uploads low-res proxies for teammates and cloud inference. It ships custom decoders for professional camera formats including Apple ProRes, Blackmagic RAW, and RED, plus LUT support, so files play without a transcode step.
On top of the editor sit automatic transcription, shot-by-shot description, embeddings, and face detection that make a footage library searchable, along with templates, an ingest flow for iPhones and SD cards, YouTube support, and MCP access for connecting your own agent. Kino also runs native models for tasks like voice healing, scene-edit detection, and rotoscoping, with more (such as eye-contact correction) described as on the way. The team says Kino grew out of bespoke on-prem deployments for productions like Survivor and A24's Beef before being rebuilt as this standalone editor. At launch the team described a Free plan with the full editor, unlimited imports and exports, real-time collaboration, and MCP access for your own agent, plus a Pro plan at $25 per editor per month adding unlimited MCP tool calls, share links, more storage, YouTube search, and team editing. Treat exact plan limits as a launch snapshot and confirm on kino.ai.
Kino fixes the edit bay — finding the moment, cutting it, polishing it with an agent's help. What it hands you is one finished master, and that is exactly where most creators stall, because a single polished cut is not a presence across platforms. [Kompozy](/) is built for that next step. Export the finished video from Kino and feed it to Kompozy: [Clipped Shorts](/glossary/clipped-short) cuts the long edit into vertical moments and reframes each to 9:16, 1:1, and 16:9 with word-synced [captions](/glossary/caption) so they carry on muted feeds, while the same source becomes a brand-exact [HyperFrames](/glossary/hyperframes) carousel, quote graphics, per-platform text, a blog post, and an email newsletter — every piece held to one [Persona Brief](/glossary/persona-brief) voice.
Then [Autopilot](/glossary/autopilot) schedules and publishes the set across the eight social platforms plus blog and email behind a per-post review gate, so one afternoon in Kino becomes a week of posts without touching an upload screen. The division of labor is clean: Kino is the professional edit-and-footage-management layer; Kompozy is the generation-and-distribution layer that multiplies a finished cut into everything that ships. For the net-new format Kino can't make — a talking-head video in your own face — pair it with [Persona Shorts](/glossary/persona-shorts).
Kino AI is an AI media manager and video editor from a Y Combinator Summer 2023 company. It combines footage storage, a code-first timeline built on Remotion, and browser-based review links, and lets humans and AI coding agents (such as Claude Code and Codex) edit the same timeline at once. It launched its standalone editor on November 4, 2026.
At launch the team described a Free plan with the full editor, unlimited imports and exports, real-time collaboration, and MCP access for your own agent, plus a Pro plan at $25 per editor per month adding unlimited MCP tool calls, share links, more storage, YouTube search, and team editing. Confirm current plans and limits on kino.ai.
No. Kino is an editor and media manager — it organizes footage and gets you to a finished cut, with browser review links for feedback. It does not reframe the cut per platform, caption it for muted feeds, cut it into shorts, or publish it. That distribution step is separate; a tool like Kompozy repurposes a finished video into platform-native posts and publishes them across platforms.
Two things: it is agent-native (humans and AI coding agents edit the same code-first timeline, and every clip, frame, and comment has a URL an agent can reference), and it is footage-first (auto-transcription, shot descriptions, and face detection make a professional-codec library searchable, with local scrubbing of ProRes, Blackmagic RAW, and RED files).