After Leaving TikTok, He Built a Viral Video Cloning Agent — NemoVideo Raises Nearly $10 Million from IDG and Jinqiu

"The core is a productivity community."

By Xu Muxin

Edited by Chen Zhiyan

Yong Yong Waves has learned exclusively that NemoVideo, founded by former core members of TikTok's creative business line — Li Zhengjin (Jin) and Liu Jingyan (Evy) — recently completed nearly $10 million in Pre-A and angel funding. The Pre-A round was led solely by IDG Capital, while angel investors include Jinqiu Capital, Tec-Do, and WeLight Ventures, as well as former 01.AI co-founder Gu Xuemei as an individual investor. PalmTree Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor for the Pre-A round.

NemoVideo enters the market with a "viral video imitation agent tool," targeting video creators as its entry point, with the long-term vision of building a video production agent platform that evolves from tool to productivity community. In the future, creators may be able to deposit and trade their own video production agents on the community platform, generating content through agent automation. Li Zhengjin emphasized to Yong Yong Waves: "In the long run, NemoVideo will be more like Canva for video — the core is staying focused on the productivity space."

Although both founders joined ByteDance in 2019, they don't fit the typical "big-tech executive turned founder" mold. Li Zhengjin began exploring entrepreneurship as a freshman, founded an educational NGO in Yunnan during his junior year, and only then joined ByteDance, where he served as product lead in TikTok's Creative department, driving the design and launch of multiple video creator tools. He later joined 01.AI to lead innovation in multimodal business, and at the start of 2025, officially launched his own venture, bringing on former colleague Evy. Evy completed her studies at Peking University and Cambridge, chose early-stage Mobike over consulting firm offers, and built Mobike's international business from zero to one before joining ByteDance to oversee operations and growth for TikTok's global creative products.

Notably, former Source Code Capital executive director Zhang Xingchen (Archer) has also joined NemoVideo's founding team.

In 2025, he decided to throw himself into AI entrepreneurship, where he met Li Zhengjin, who had just recruited Evy. The three formed NemoVideo's founding team. Zhang Xingchen told Yong Yong Waves: The team's TikTok background gives this video editing agent startup at least three advantages — insight into creator and merchant pain points and needs, know-how for global go-to-market, and deeper understanding of video editing tool design logic.

Before the product's official launch, Yong Yong Waves sat down with NemoVideo's founding team —

Product concept image | Provided by interviewee

Part 01

"Tools Can't Build Moats —

Communities Can"

Yong Yong: What exactly is NemoVideo?

Jin: Long-term, we want to build a "video production agent community." Currently we're gradually building our capabilities by targeting a very specific segment — a "viral video imitation" agent tool for "affiliate creators" and "freelance editors." But in the long run, every creator on this community can build their own agent that understands their video creation workflow, style, and tool invocation methods, helping them with many efficiency tasks in creation. The agent serves as the creator's digital twin, capturing all their know-how, forming a positive business cycle and data flywheel.

Yong Yong: Who are your current target users?

Jin: We're targeting a very niche market — overseas affiliate creators and freelance editors. Their content production is inspiration-heavy, rough-cut-heavy, post-production-light, and they need to produce large volumes daily with little budget for professional teams.

Evy: For example, we have a user who's a North American affiliate creator. When editing alone, she could produce at most 3 videos per day. With Nemo's capabilities, she now consistently produces 10 or more.

Yong Yong: You're both from TikTok — how is this fundamentally different from CapCut?

Jin: CapCut already does many things well, but from a tools perspective, we insist on being AI-native. AI shouldn't be a fully automated black box — it should be the creator's "co-pilot" and "partner," handling high-repetition grunt work while returning control and creativity to the user. Also, I don't think CapCut has formed a true creator community, which relates somewhat to early creator incentive strategies.

Long-term, Nemo will be more like Canva for video — creators in the community can make money from their work, which is the model we prefer. From a business perspective, a pure tool may have limited imagination and defensibility, but I believe a community built around creation and transaction has more opportunity.

Yong Yong: Did your TikTok experience lead directly to this startup?

Jin: Seeing the ecosystem from inside the platform, you understand its contradictions very well. The biggest contradiction is production capacity — platforms strongly encourage content production. TikTok's key UGC metric is publish rate, meaning what percentage of DAU are willing to post videos. The monetization ads and commerce teams also track how much content creators and merchants can publish weekly, because under the recommendation engine logic, only with sufficient content output can users see and potentially purchase. But the problem is "can't make enough."

Evy: Among freelance editor creators, even mid- and long-tail creators below 20,000 followers get hounded by merchants daily. From inspiration to rough cut to post-production, completing a relatively polished video is essentially a massive project. Eighty percent of time goes into manual fine-tuning details, not "creativity" itself. While everyone's used to this, it's clearly not ideal.

Yong Yong: The product is still in beta — when will the official version launch?

Jin: We're continuing to refine it, hoping to get the product into a positive growth channel soon and expand our user base. For us, polishing the product is most important. Because all productivity products and productivity communities require a genuinely good tool as foundation.

Yong Yong: What new features after official launch?

Jin: First, supporting more non-linear creation paths — users can start from script, footage, or brief. Second, strengthening AI capabilities in the inspiration and rough-cut phases. For example, users can give us a reference video and we'll help cut something with similar structure, even mixing multiple videos' scripts, captions, and pacing to generate a new video. It's "Anything In, Video Out."

Yong Yong: How will the community monetize?

Jin: Currently we're on subscription plus token billing. But in the future, when the community grows, we prefer outcome-based pricing. That is, agent creators on the platform can set their own prices. If my agent produces high-quality videos, I can charge $3 per video; another that's fast but rough might charge 50 cents.

Part 02

"Willing to Pay for Flights

Just to Meet Candidates in Person"

Yong Yong: I heard you raised two rounds within six months — how?

Jin: We did raise relatively smoothly. Jinqiu gave us a term sheet in two days for the first round; IDG gave verbal confirmation same day for the second. We're also fortunate to meet investors who really understand the business. Especially getting through Jinqiu's strict due diligence shows they recognize our ability to "deliver results."

Yong Yong: Do you sense FOMO among investors around AI agents?

Jin: Haha, we just focus on our work. Not sure if it's FOMO, but fundraising has indeed been well-received by investors — we recently added a round with a top-tier firm.

Yong Yong: Some say for this wave of agent companies, money is the biggest barrier. What do you think?

Jin: Raising more money does bring resource advantages, but too much can backfire. First, from a product perspective, with that much funding and such high valuation, market expectations are naturally high. So if the team internally feels the product is just "okay," they may hesitate and not ship, failing to enter rapid iteration.

Second, it's not necessarily good for early employees willing to join. Because people join startups for the expected returns, and the biggest source of returns is rapid option appreciation. If valuation starts too high, achieving 10x growth becomes very difficult.

Yong Yong: It's not just competitive investing — agent entrepreneurship itself is very crowded. Do you still think this year is a good time?

Jin: Building agents is consensus this year, but entrepreneurship was probably best in 2023-2024. While that tested a team's fundraising ability more, because the赛道 lacked consensus, you had more time to refine and explore. Now consensus has basically formed, the赛道 enters the spotlight, and everyone's in a rush.

However, video agents are indeed much more complex than text/image, requiring more tool-level preparation. We're among the earlier entrants, giving us some timing advantage. Plus we're targeting a niche market that's not strategically important for big tech, which gives us some room.

Yong Yong: Has AI lowered the barrier to entrepreneurship?

Jin: It's only lowered the barrier to "getting started doing things." But entrepreneurship in China remains difficult. Because there's no fully YC-equivalent ecosystem, founders often rely on a single BP, walking around Guomao and Huamao for weeks to raise money. This demands high maturity from entrepreneurs.

Yong Yong: How many people at Nemo now?

Jin: Currently about a dozen, all full-time. We're expanding, focusing on two directions: senior technical talent, especially familiar with audio/video or agent products; and growth, particularly people with hands-on experience in overseas community playbooks.

Yong Yong: Hiring seems to be a common pain point for startups now — any special tricks?

Archer: Sincerity (laughs). Hiring is indeed hard. While there are many experienced talents in the market, the required competency profile has changed in the AI era. Previously, doing product or growth meant hiring many people to execute together, but now much execution and repetitive work can be done through AI — R&D, design, and growth execution are all completely different.

So experience definitely isn't the top priority. We now value entrepreneurial spirit and willingness to go all-in more. In return, we bring full sincerity — like paying for round-trip flights just to meet someone in person.

Jin: I'm currently overseeing product and technology overall. As business expands, I hope to find an exceptional technical lead who can take the team to the next level.

Yong Yong: "Entrepreneurial spirit" over individual track record?

Jin: The market looks hot this year, but the real environment isn't easy. For people still at big companies, joining an early-stage startup means more uncertainty and personal and family concerns. So they often need longer psychological adjustment, and may drop out due to不适应, which is heavy损耗 for early teams.

Evy: I often feel like I'm "building a skyscraper on flat ground." Entrepreneurship is difficult. Even with strong mental preparation, operations can feel hard. In these moments, "entrepreneurial spirit" and firm belief in our chosen赛道 are strong supports for moving forward.

Image source | Unsplash

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