FOTOhub Raises $8.6M and Launches FH Shorts — an AI-Powered Short-Form Video Factory

When I Started Building FOTOhub Two Years Ago, I Had One Obsession. I wanted every creator in the world — regardless of budget, equipment, or team — to have access to tools that had previously been reserved for large production studios. Today I can say that this vision is materializing faster than any of us predicted.

FOTOhub has closed a total of $8.6 million in funding in 2026. Our investors include DGE3 Investment VC and Amazon Web Services, which accepted us into its portfolio as one of the most promising European companies in the Creative AI category. Our valuation reached $180 million in Q2 of this year, and the platform serves over 750,000 users in more than 40 countries. These numbers are not goals in themselves — they are fuel that allows us to build things our users have been dreaming about for months.

One of those things is FH Shorts.

What FH Shorts Is and Why It Changes the Game

FH Shorts is a new module inside FOTOhub Creative AI OS that transforms any video recording — a podcast, vlog, lecture, stream, or interview — into a series of short, dynamic clips ready for publication on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and every other short-form platform. The entire process takes minutes and requires not a single second of manual editing from you.

Imagine this scenario. You recorded an hour-long podcast with your guest. In the traditional workflow, you now need to sit down at your editing software, listen through the whole thing, cut the best fragments, add subtitles, adapt the format to vertical, export at the right resolution, and repeat this five, ten, fifteen times for each clip. That is an entire day of work. With FH Shorts, you upload one recording and the system does everything for you — it analyzes the content, finds the most engaging moments, trims, reframes to 9:16 format, generates captions synchronized with speech, selects the visual style, and delivers finished clips for your review and publication.

This is not another simple trimmer that cuts a recording every 60 seconds. FH Shorts understands the context of what you are saying. It uses advanced language models to analyze the transcript and identify moments with the highest viral potential — a punchline, a controversial thesis, an emotional fragment, a surprising fact. The system knows that a short-form video needs a hook in the first two seconds, tension in the middle, and a satisfying ending. And that is exactly how it composes each clip.

Three Modes That Cover Every Creator's Need

FH Shorts operates in three fundamental modes, each addressing a different content creation scenario.

The first is Clip Mode — the mode for anyone with a longer recording who wants to extract short clips from it. You upload a video, the system transcribes it, analyzes it, and proposes the best moments for cutting. You can accept the AI suggestions or manually point to fragments that interest you. Each clip automatically receives captions, vertical reframing, and a professional look.

The second is Create Mode — the mode where you need no source material at all. You write a topic or paste a script, and FH Shorts generates a complete short video from scratch. The system creates a storyboard, generates images or video using our AI models, adds voice narration from IDA AI — our proprietary text-to-speech model supporting over 50 voices in over 30 languages — and assembles everything into a publish-ready piece. This is the ideal solution for brands, educators, and creators who need regular content but lack the time or budget for production.

The third is Avatar Mode — the most advanced mode, where a realistic digital presenter appears on screen. You write a script, select an avatar or upload your own photo, and the system generates a video where the avatar speaks your text with natural lip synchronization, gestures, and facial expressions. This is technology that just a year ago cost tens of thousands of dollars and required a specialist studio. In FOTOhub, you have it for a few credits.

The Technology Behind the Scenes

I will not hide that I am the engineer and architect of this system, so allow me a moment of technical enthusiasm. FH Shorts is not a single AI model — it is a pipeline composed of nine stages, each leveraging a different set of models and algorithms.

It begins with transcription and speaker diarization using state-of-the-art speech recognition models. The system automatically identifies who is speaking at any given moment, which is crucial for podcasts and interviews. The transcript then passes to our content analysis model, which evaluates each fragment for engagement potential — it uses Claude from Anthropic, one of our key technology partners, for this purpose.

Next comes intelligent trimming that preserves context, reframing that accounts for face position and camera movement, caption generation with precise word-level synchronization, rendering with visual effects, and finally export optimization for specific platforms. Each of these steps is an independent microservice running on dedicated GPU infrastructure, allowing us to process many videos in parallel without queues or delays.

All of this runs on our own infrastructure — four GPU servers in Europe, each optimized for a specific type of computation. We do not rely on external APIs for key operations. This is our technology, our models, our infrastructure. And that is the fundamental difference between FOTOhub and tools that merely wrap someone else's API.

Why Now and Why This Matters for You

The short-form content market has exploded. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, LinkedIn Video — every platform is shifting toward short videos. Algorithms reward this format, users consume it, advertisers pay for it. The problem is that producing short-form content at scale remains absurdly time-consuming.

A typical creator who wants to publish one short video per day across three platforms needs to spend two to four hours on editing. An agency serving ten clients needs a dedicated team of editors. A company with an ambitious content marketing strategy must choose between quality and quantity.

FH Shorts eliminates that compromise. Quality and quantity stop being mutually exclusive because production that used to take hours now takes minutes. And costs drop from thousands per month on subscriptions and freelancers to a few dozen in the FOTOhub Professional plan.

I am not saying this as a marketing slogan. I am saying it as the engineer who built this system and watches our beta testers generate in one evening as much content as they previously produced over an entire week.

FH Shorts in the Context of Creative AI OS

FH Shorts is not a standalone product. It is an integral part of FOTOhub Creative AI OS — our operating system for creativity that integrates 200+ AI models from 10+ providers in a single interface. This means FH Shorts has native access to all platform capabilities.

Need to generate B-Roll for your clip? You have 80+ image generation models and 8+ video models. Want to add background music? IDA AI generates soundtracks matched to the mood of your video. Need to translate and dub a clip into another language? The dubbing pipeline with voice cloning is built in. Want to automatically publish finished clips? The Social Media module sends them to your accounts on schedule.

This is the power of the platform — every module amplifies the others, and you do not need to jump between ten different applications and subscriptions. One account, one billing, one interface. And one Gabriel AI — our proprietary orchestrator to which you only need to say "make me five clips from yesterday's podcast and schedule their publication for the whole week" for it to handle the rest.

$8.6M — What This Funding Means for Our Users

Raising $8.6 million is not an abstract number on an investor slide. It directly translates into what you get as a user in the product.

This money goes toward three things. First — infrastructure. Every new GPU server means shorter generation times, fewer queues, and more simultaneous tasks. We just launched a third GPU server dedicated to audio processing and speech synthesis, meaning voice generation in FH Shorts and IDA AI is now instantaneous.

Second — development of proprietary AI models. IDA AI is just the beginning. We are working on additional proprietary models that will be available exclusively in FOTOhub and that will give our users capabilities unavailable anywhere else. Proprietary models also mean independence from external providers and their pricing — and that translates into lower prices for you.

Third — expansion. FOTOhub operates in more than 40 countries today, but our goal is to become the global standard in the Creative AI category. The planned Series A round at the turn of Q4 2026 and Q1 2027 will open DACH, UK, and US markets for us at full scale.

Amazon Web Services did not just invest in us financially — they accepted us into their portfolio as a strategic partner. This means access to the latest cloud technologies, architectural support, and a network of contacts that opens doors to enterprise clients worldwide.

Who FH Shorts Is For

FH Shorts was designed for everyone who creates or needs to create short-form content — but it particularly changes the game in several scenarios.

For the podcaster who wants ten promotional clips after every episode on social media — without hiring an editor and without hours spent in DaVinci Resolve. You upload the episode, AI finds the best moments, you receive finished clips with captions and professional reframing.

For the marketing agency serving multiple clients that needs to produce content at scale — without proportionally scaling the team. One specialist with FH Shorts does what previously required three people.

For the e-commerce brand that knows video sells but does not have the budget for regular production — Create Mode generates product clips from just descriptions and photos.

For the educator and coach who wants to reach new audiences on TikTok and Reels but does not feel comfortable in front of a camera — Avatar Mode provides professional presentation without needing to record yourself.

For the newsroom and editorial team that must react quickly — Create Mode with URL generates a video recap from an article in minutes, not hours.

Pricing That Makes Sense

One of the things I am most proud of at FOTOhub is the pricing model. The entire Creative AI OS — including FH Shorts — starts with a free plan. The Medium plan at 29 PLN per month gives 1,500 credits, enough for dozens of short videos monthly. Professional at 69 PLN provides 4,000 credits and full access to all modes including Avatar Mode.

For comparison — dedicated AI short-form video tools (Opus Clip, Vidyo.ai, Pictory) cost $19 to $99 per month and do ONE thing. In FOTOhub, for less, you get FH Shorts PLUS 80+ image models, PLUS video generation, PLUS music and audio, PLUS video editor, PLUS graphics editor, PLUS automation, PLUS storage, PLUS API. This is not a comparison — it is an entirely different league.

What Comes Next

FH Shorts V2, which we are launching today, is just the foundation. In the coming weeks we are adding podcast intelligence with automatic format recognition and split-screen for multiple speakers. We are working on a series system — automatic division of content into numbered parts with cliffhangers and scheduled publishing. We are building deep analytics that will show you not only how many views your clips collected but why some perform better than others.

Our roadmap for the second half of 2026 is ambitious, but we have the team, technology, and funding to execute it. And above all, we have 750,000 users who show us every day what to build next.

FH Shorts is available starting today for all FOTOhub users — including those on the free plan. Log in at fotohub.app, navigate to the Shorts module, and see for yourself.

We are building the future of creation. And we want you to be part of it.

Mateusz Ulewicz

Founder & CTO, FOTOhub

Top 5 / 2.1M in the main Crunchbase category

FOTOhub — Creative AI OS | 750K+ Users | $8.6M Raised | $180M Valuation

fotohub.app | [email protected]

Crunchbase: crunchbase.com/organization/fotohub

Investor Relations: fotohub.app/investors