MITO

Happy Monday.

We’re excited to announce that our Unicorner team has officially grown by one! As of this week, Larissa is joining us as our first full-time hire, helping us continue building our weekly startup covers while expanding into new content. Stay tuned for more on that new content soon. 👀 

In the meantime, keeping you updated: we’re in SF this week, and Austin from March 14-19 for SXSW. Events we’re hosting + RSVPs are below. If you want to grab a coffee, respond to this email, and we’ll make it happen.

Ethan and Arek 🦄

• Tuesday, Feb. 24 (SF): We’re hosting a seed+ founders dinner for 20 founders with Fidelity Private Shares and Fenwick. RSVP here.

• Sunday, Mar. 15 (Austin): We’re hosting an emerging managers + founding GPs dinner for 25 VCs at SXSW with Mercury and Sydecar. RSVP here.

MITO is an AI-native video creation platform for filmmakers, designers, and creative teams. The platform features six core modules: moodboards, storyboards, Figma-style team collaboration, interactive landing pages, video model integrations (Nano Banana, Kling AI, Veo, ElevenLabs, and more), and an AI agent that can make many actions on the user’s behalf. Together, these make up every step of the workflow from concept to timeline editing. In addition to its product, the company organizes MITO Films, a production service, and MITO Universe, which provides creatives a space to exchange ideas and assets.

Check it out: mito.ai

MITO is available with a freemium model. Its free tier extends 4,000 credits for exploration. Its Pro plan, available for $24 per seat, provides 20,000 credits and supports five minutes of high-quality video. The Studio plan, designed for high-volume production with priority support and extended credit rollovers, is available for $72 per seat with 80,000 credits. For large organizations, the Enterprise plan brings custom pricing with unified billing and enhanced security.

• Raised $4.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from firms including Sequoia Capital, K Fund, Kibo Ventures, and Everywhere Ventures, alongside a group of angel investors

• Officially launched three weeks ago in January 2026 

• Gained access to Seedance 2.0, ByteDance’s newest AI video creation tool that is currently limited to a select group of companies

MITO is scaling its team and hiring across Product, Marketing, Engineering, and Operations. If you are interested, reach out to us by replying directly to this email!

Taking a look at MITO’s team explains its "by filmmakers, for filmmakers" slogan. 

MITO’s CCO, Arantxa Barcia, is an art director and a filmmaker with a background in fashion and advertising at companies like MIRAVEO, with specialized experience in content creation for creators and brands. Barcia holds two master’s degrees, one in digital marketing and a second in commercial management and marketing in the textile and fashion sector. 

At the same time, CPO Danny Saltaren is a National Design Award 2021 recipient in the category of Young Designers by Spain’s Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities. Saltaren previously co-founded a digital growth studio and a product/brand studio.

Last, and definitely not least, is MITO’s CEO, Iñaki Berenguer, a serial entrepreneur who serves as a managing partner at LifeX Ventures, a $100 million fund investing at the intersection of AI and science. He previously founded three companies that were acquired, and holds an MBA from MIT and a PhD in engineering from the University of Cambridge.

The year 2023 marked a significant leap forward in general purpose AI video generation, with tools like Runway Gen-1 enabling the creation of short videos based on images and prompts. These early models also gave us some bizarre internet art, including the absolutely nightmare “Will Smith eating spaghetti” meme generated using Modelscope’s text2video model. Although the internet scoffed at these early AI video creations, fast-forward to just over two years later, and we’ve seen remarkable progress. The Will Smith meme even became a benchmark to analyze, year after year, the evolution of AI-video generation tools.

Despite the rapid improvement, most AI video tools remain one-shot solutions. This means you type a prompt, get a clip, and if it's 90% perfect, you discard it because it’s not easy to fix the remaining 10%. This can be addressed with standard video editing software, but there’s no connection between them and video generation models. In fact, video creatives have always faced unnecessarily complex, disjointed, and expensive workflows, even with legacy, pre-AI software.

MITO solves this with an infinite editing canvas. Imagine a Figma for video, where filmmakers can manage content like moodboards, storyboards, and scripts in one place. It is completely AI-native, meaning users can create everything directly on the platform.

Its product also stands out by integrating multiple leading AI models like Nano Banana, Kling AI, Veo 3, ElevenLabs, and more. This makes MITO future-proof, since it isn’t reliant on any single model and instead derives its value from bringing the best services together in one place. Moreover, it means creators don’t have to worry about juggling different tools and subscriptions, nor spend time keeping up with the newest and best models. 

In essence, its value proposition is offering big studio infrastructure to small creative teams, giving them access to the same high-end orchestration tools previously reserved for Disney or Pixar. 

Zooming out, the global film and video production market was valued at $316.3 billion in 2026 and is expected to reach $443.6 billion by 2035. Meanwhile, the digital ad spending market size represents a $600 billion market and is projected to more than double over the next decade. 

It’s not a surprise then that the advertising world was quick to implement AI video generation tools, with popular commercial AI productions like the Toys “R” Us AI origin story or the AI-generated ad that aired during the NBA Finals.

However, with AI slop and surrealist images everywhere (the Facebook feed is there to prove it), storytelling has become the most important skill today for brands and companies. LinkedIn job postings for "storyteller" actually doubled in 2025.

Given just how many industries rely on storytelling and visual media, and how MITO is enabling brands and small teams to focus on that rather than budget and technical constraints, we believe MITO has the potential to be a blockbuster company that changes the next era of professional storytelling. 

• MITO AI: $4.5 Million Pre-Seed Funding Closed For Collaborative AI Video Creation Platform [Pulse 2.0] 

• Reinventing video creation with collaborative AI: Why we invested in MITO [Kfund] 

• MITO AI raised $4.5 million to launch project-management software for filmmakers. Read its pitch deck. [Business Insider] 

• MITO AI Raises $4.5M Preseed Led by Lightspeed to Empower Creatives with Collaborative AI Video Tools [MorningStar]

ICYMI: We recently announced our official investor syndicate. Check out the announcement post for more details on how to invest in our deals.