Descript

Descript was spun out in 2017 by Groupon co-founder Andrew Mason (who had stepped down from Groupon after its IPO) from his previous company Detour, an audio walkthrough app. The original idea was to replace waveform-based audio editing with text-based editing — deleting a sentence deletes the matching audio track, dragging a paragraph rearranges the audio. The team grew out of Detour's internal tools, and the product took shape after a UC Berkeley ML PhD joined.

Core capabilities sit on three pillars. First, text-based editing: upload audio or video and Descript auto-transcribes via ASR; editing the text edits the media. Second, Underlord: an AI co-editor that launched in late 2022 alongside a $50M Series C led by the OpenAI Startup Fund — it can generate whole video segments, extend clips, fill in gaps, and re-style footage from a single prompt. Third, Overdub and AI Speech: voice cloning and text-to-speech capabilities inherited from the 2019 acquisition of Montreal-based Lyrebird (a Yoshua Bengio lab spin-off) — type a new word and Descript inserts it in your own cloned voice. Studio Sound, Remove Filler Words, Green Screen, Eye Contact, and 20+ other AI tools are bundled in; subtitle and caption translation supports 30+ languages with proofreading.

Use cases include podcast post-production (with transcript-driven editing and cloned-voice patch-ups), talking-head YouTube and TikTok videos, corporate training videos, product demos, and marketing short-form video. Platforms are Mac/Windows desktop plus Web (no mobile browser support and no iOS/Android apps). The free tier is not for commercial use; Hobbyist at $16/month (billed annually) suits individuals, Creator at $24/month fits weekly creators, and Business at $50/month includes a 5-seat team workspace with translation. Total funding exceeds $80M (a16z, OpenAI Startup Fund, Spark Capital, and others).