Sieve was founded in 2021 to solve a problem that nearly every team building with video runs into: stringing together the many specialized models needed to process video — transcription, diarization, translation, dubbing, object detection, redaction, scene understanding — is slow, brittle, and operationally heavy. Sieve packages those capabilities into reliable, composable APIs so developers can ship AI video features without becoming infrastructure experts.
The product spans the full video-AI stack. On the understanding side, Sieve offers transcription, visual search, and metadata extraction that make video libraries queryable. On the transformation side, it offers translation and visual dubbing, background and object removal, and other editing primitives. The unifying idea is an API-first platform where each function is a callable endpoint that scales automatically, with the heavy GPU orchestration handled behind the scenes.
Sieve raised roughly $4 million in a seed round led by Matrix Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, Swift Ventures, the Nat Friedman/Daniel Gross AI Grant, and a notable group of angels including Lucy Guo and Eric Jang. Reported totals across rounds reach about $12 million, reflecting continued backing as the company expanded its API surface.
The company competes with both general inference platforms and point solutions, but its differentiation is breadth specifically within video plus a focus on production reliability. Rather than offering a single model, Sieve curates and operationalizes the best models for each task and exposes them through one consistent developer experience — meaningfully reducing time-to-ship for video features.
For businesses, Sieve turns advanced video AI into a procurement decision rather than a research project. Teams building media tools, content platforms, security and moderation systems, or localization pipelines can adopt Sieve's APIs to add capabilities that would otherwise require a dedicated ML team. As video becomes the dominant content format, an infrastructure layer that makes it programmable is strategically valuable.