Clova

Clova is a San Francisco-based AI creative studio founded in early 2025 by Will Wang, Ryan Bailey, and Gyan Prakash, backed by Founders, Inc. and LAUNCH Accelerator.²⁷ The company launched publicly in May 2025 as a video editing tool, pivoted to an AI video generation platform later that year, and by April 2026 marketed itself as a conversational tool for generating images, videos, and brand design materials.¹ Wang and Bailey previously co-founded DashBill, a fraternity dues-management platform, before winding it down in January 2025 to start Clova.⁹

Founding and team

Wang and Bailey both attended the University of California, Riverside, where they were members of the same Kappa Sigma fraternity chapter. Bailey earned a B.S. in Accounting and Finance from UCR; Wang studied Business Information Systems.¹⁰⁹ They co-founded DashBill in December 2019 while still in college, scaling it over five years to over $2 million in payment volume and more than 2,500 users before closing it in January 2025.⁹ Gyan Prakash joined as third co-founder.²

Clova secured backing from two early-stage programs. LAUNCH Accelerator, Jason Calacanis's San Francisco-based accelerator, invests $125,000 per company in 14-week cohorts.⁷ Founders, Inc. — the Fort Mason-based firm run by Furqan Rydhan — writes checks of up to $250,000 for 4–7% equity and provides portfolio companies with desk space at its SF campus, daily lunches, office hours, and hardware lab access.³ PitchBook lists an accelerator round from early 2025 and an early-stage VC round from March 2025, with five employees and two investors as of April 2026.⁷

Launch

Wang announced Clova on X on May 3, 2025: "Introducing Clova — Its [sic] cursor for video editing, generates full edits from a simple prompt & its [sic] live right now @ joinclova.com/edit."⁸ The tweet included a 55-second demo and accumulated 833,000 views.⁸ An early YouTube reviewer who tested the product at launch reported server downtime and repeated errors, attributing the instability to the volume of incoming traffic.¹² Wang published a companion YouTube video titled "My new startup idea" the same day, linking to the product and its waitlist.¹³ By April 2026, EliteAI.tools reported 100% uptime and a 149ms average response time for the product.¹⁷

Clova's Product Hunt listing received 9 upvotes and ranked #75 on its daily leaderboard without being featured on Product Hunt's homepage.¹¹ Content creator Brycent covered the product in a June 3, 2025 Instagram reel titled "ChatGPT for video editing — Clova," citing Veo 3, Sora, and Kling as integrated models.¹⁵ Paul Bakaus, a developer relations professional at Google, included Clova in a May 12, 2025 LinkedIn roundup of AI video-editing tools, describing it as "the footage librarian: tags faces, dialogue, A-roll/B-roll, then hands you prompt-based rough cuts."¹⁶

Product evolution

The original Clova concept, still described on the Founders, Inc. portfolio page as of April 2026, was an AI assistant for video production: users would upload raw footage, search it using natural language ("smiling crowd," "slow-motion waterfall," "interview highlights"), have the tool surface matching clips, build a timeline, and export to Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, or DaVinci Resolve.²

By March 2026, when Brian W. Sykes reviewed the product in his AI Lab newsletter, Clova had shifted to AI video generation. Sykes noted the divergence from the original concept directly: "In 2025, 'Clova is the AI assistant that turns hours of raw video... Which is NOT what the current platform offers.'"⁶ The product at that point offered text-to-video generation using Veo 3 (Google) and Kling 2.1 (Kuaishou), a built-in timeline editor for manual control, viral content templates, and analytics to track video performance.⁶ Sykes identified direct timeline editing and a brand-consistency feature as two notable capabilities; at the time of his March 2026 review, the brand-consistency feature — which let users define a visual style and reuse it across generated content — was not prominently listed in Clova's marketing.⁶ Wang published a YouTube video titled "Pivoting my startup idea" that documented the team's decision to shift direction.¹⁴

By April 2026, the Clova homepage described the product as "Your AI creative studio. Generate images, videos, and designs — all from a single conversation," with use cases centered on product photography, brand identity, packaging design, social posts, and advertising creatives.¹ The brand-consistency feature had become a centerpiece of the product's marketing, with the homepage describing it as "Lock in your look. Define your style once, then carry it across every image, ad, and package mockup."¹ Clova runs on third-party AI generation models accessed via API rather than proprietary models.⁶ Pricing follows a credits model; the homepage offers free entry with no credit card required.¹

References

1. Clova — Your AI Creative Studio(accessed Apr 21, 2026)
2. Clova — Founders, Inc. Portfolio(accessed Apr 21, 2026)
3. About our fund — Founders, Inc.(accessed Apr 21, 2026)
4. Ryan Bailey — Founders, Inc.(accessed Apr 21, 2026)
5. Will Wang — Founders, Inc.(accessed Apr 21, 2026)
6. Test Driving Clova — AI Lab by Brian W. Sykes(accessed Apr 21, 2026)
7. Clova 2026 Company Profile — PitchBook(accessed Apr 21, 2026)
8. Introducing Clova — @iamwilliamwang on X(accessed Apr 21, 2026)
9. Will Wang — LinkedIn(accessed Apr 21, 2026)
10. Ryan Bailey — LinkedIn(accessed Apr 21, 2026)
11. Clova — Product Hunt launch tracker(accessed Apr 21, 2026)
12. Is Clova the Future of Video Editing or Just Another AI Fad? — YouTube(accessed Apr 21, 2026)
13. My new startup idea — Will Wang on YouTube(accessed Apr 21, 2026)
14. Pivoting my startup idea — Will Wang on YouTube(accessed Apr 21, 2026)
15. ChatGPT for video editing — Clova — Brycent on Instagram(accessed Apr 21, 2026)
16. AI vibe editors roundup — Paul Bakaus on LinkedIn(accessed Apr 21, 2026)
17. Clova — EliteAI.tools(accessed Apr 21, 2026)