Alexei Chemenda has a particular way of framing his company's mission. "We raised $11M to make video editors obsolete," the Poolday CEO wrote when announcing the funding. "Not the humans, the tools."
That distinction matters in an industry where creative professionals are watching generative AI with equal parts fascination and unease. Poolday, which emerged from stealth mode this September after operating under the name Viraaal, secured $11 million from LocalGlobe, daphni, Geek Ventures, 10x Founders, Kima Ventures and Motier Ventures. The San Francisco startup declined to specify whether the round was Series A or an extended seed, and wouldn't name a lead investor. Angel backers include Jean-Baptiste Hironde of MWM, Mathilde Collin of Front, and Maxime Demeure of Madbox.
The announcement appeared first in a LinkedIn post from daphni partner Shabir Vasram, a reminder of how venture announcements now surface through multiple channels before landing in press releases.
The Pitch: Text Brief to Finished Ad
Poolday's product is an AI agent that converts text briefs, brand assets, and raw footage into finished video advertisements. Under the hood, the platform orchestrates what it calls specialized sub-agents that handle discrete tasks like object detection and depth mapping, then stitches everything together while maintaining brand guidelines. A live editor allows marketers to tweak individual elements without regenerating the entire video, a practical consideration for anyone who's waited through long render times.
The company claims it has completed over 100 million video edits, a figure displayed on its homepage. Some launch coverage cited 700,000 agent runs, though that metric appears only in aggregator posts and not on Poolday's own site. Perhaps the disparity reflects different ways of counting automated tasks versus complete projects.
The platform supports 115 connectors and integrates with the Model Context Protocol, pulling brand assets from Figma, Canva, and external servers. Use cases on display include product launches, Instagram ads, and podcast clips. In one example, Poolday says it produced a demo video for analytics company PostHog using only the brand kit and a single text prompt.
Founder With an Exit
Chemenda isn't new to the ad-tech world. He previously co-founded MotionLead, which went through Y Combinator's Winter 2014 batch before being acquired by mobile advertising firm Adikteev. He stayed on as Adikteev's chief revenue officer and managing director for the Americas. Forbes recognized him in its 30 Under 30 list in 2019. His co-founder this time is Oliver Nicolini, who serves as CTO.
Before this latest round, Poolday had raised $4.9 million in seed funding, according to an SEC Form D filing. Geek Ventures and Quonota Investments participated in that earlier round, per Crunchbase data. The Delaware corporation lists 11 to 50 employees on LinkedIn.
Riding the AI Video Wave
The timing aligns with broader industry momentum. An Interactive Advertising Bureau report from 2025 found that nearly 90 percent of advertisers planned to use generative AI for video ad production. Separately, video platform Wistia reported that AI adoption in video production more than doubled year-over-year, with 58 percent of companies pointing to team size and resources as their biggest constraint.
Poolday enters a market already crowded with AI video tools. Runway offers generative video capabilities; Synthesia and Colossyan focus on AI avatars and synthetic media. Colossyan raised $22 million in February 2024. Poolday's bet is that its orchestration layer and brand-fidelity features will distinguish it from competitors building similar infrastructure.
Whether that's enough to carve out defensible territory remains an open question. The space is moving quickly, and the technical moats in generative AI have proven shallow before. For now, Chemenda and his team have capital and a clear target: the expensive, time-consuming process of cutting video ads. The humans doing that work may take some comfort in his framing, though history suggests new tools reshape roles rather than simply augment them.
