In professional video production, creativity is rarely the bottleneck. More often, the process can be slowed by the seemingly unending tangle of backend tasks: organizing terabytes of footage, generating proxies, syncing audio. These chores are critical to keeping projects on track, but pull editors away from the work they actually love.
For Tamish Pulappadi, a Bengaluru-born guitarist turned Stanford-trained technologist, those pain points weren’t just abstract inefficiencies; they were lived frustrations.
Now, as CEO and co-founder of Cocreate, Pulappadi is leading a Y Combinator-backed team that builds AI infrastructure to clear the clutter from modern media workflows — without trying to replace the human at the heart of the creative process.
The Founder with a Dual Fluency
Pulappadi’s trajectory into tech entrepreneurship didn’t follow the standard pattern of hackathons and seed decks. Music was his first language. By age thirteen, he had become the youngest-ever Ernie Ball Music Man endorsee and the first Indian guitarist to receive the honor, earning coverage from Rolling Stone India and induction into the Brotherhood of the Guitar.
After years of composing, recording, and performing, he gained an intimate understanding of the creative state: how vital uninterrupted flow is to producing high-quality work, and how easily it can be disrupted.
That perspective deepened at Stanford University, where he combined studies in computer science and music technology with hands-on experiments. Alongside fellow musician-engineers Archish Arun and Sid Yu, Pulappadi began brainstorming for solutions for the slow, manual steps that bottleneck a different type of artistic form: video editing.
The problem was based on their actual experiences, as all three had spent tedious hours organizing, filing, and pre-editing media files for their own projects. This common feeling became the blueprint for Cocreate: a tool designed by creators, for creators, built with the precision of engineers who know the cost of wasted time.
Cocreate: Assisting Editors By Fueling Their Creativity
In 2025, Pulappadi co-founded Cocreate, an editing tool that aims to solve the creative hurdles that occur when first getting all the material necessary to edit together. Most editing suites leave media teams to wrestle with laborious setup before they can even begin shaping a narrative.
Cocreate sets out to fix this by focusing not on the editing interface, but on the invisible foundations beneath it. The platform works with AI to automatically deal with backend tasks that get in the way of creativity: it pre-labels assets by visual and audio content, automatically syncs multi-camera footage, creates lower-resolution versions of video files to make editing easier and faster, and adapts to a team’s workflow by learning and anticipating repetitive steps — all aimed at removing friction without intruding on the creative process.
Mindful of the unease some creatives feel toward tools that might replace their work, Pulappadi set up Cocreate to take a measured approach to this technology. Instead of generating edits or offering style suggestions, its AI merely acts from behind the scenes, giving editors the space needed to let their usual editing process flow. This backend-first approach lets creators stay in the editing zone instead of toggling between storage folders, naming conventions, and manual sync processes.
Pulappadi often describes the mission as “raising the ceiling for professionals and lowering the floor for non-technical creatives.” For an experienced editor, that might mean an afternoon spent shaping narrative arcs instead of matching waveforms. For an independent creator slowly building their technical knowledge, this can mean giving them access to more advanced media workflows that they could typically get with basic, entry-level software.
In cases like these, Cocreate acts as an assistant rather than a co-creator — letting creators focus on delivering quality editing projects, not sorting through filenames.
Their Journey To Early Funding
The leap from side project to startup came with Cocreate’s acceptance into Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 batch. In the accelerator, Pulappadi and his team refined their core thesis under the guidance of mentors including Gustaf Alstromer, Brad Flora, Jon Xu, Matt Riley, and Eli Brown.
The product vision sharpened: AI wouldn’t be the headliner but the engine driving invisible improvements in the form and time that editors can deliver projects. Early adopters, such as professional editors, production houses, and content teams, validated the approach, praising Cocreate’s ability to integrate into their usual media workflows without demanding a wholesale tool switch.
This was followed by a pre-seed round of $500,000, which gave the team more resources at their disposal to expand the product’s capabilities. One of the main aspects Pulappadi and his team have highlighted is their wish to position Cocreate as an infrastructure provider rather than a competing creative suite.
For media professionals, that distinction matters; it signals a product designed to make their tools better, not obsolete.
Building AI That Protects, Not Replaces, Creativity
Rather than acting as an alternative to established editing tools, Cocreate builds connective tissue between them, using AI to compress repetitive manual work into background processes. As the platform continues to grow out of its Y Combinator roots, Tamish Pulappadi remains anchored to that original insight from their own projects: the less time spent on process, the more energy available to create engaging, quality storytelling.
A seasoned technology executive with a proven record of developing and executing innovative strategies to scale high-growth SaaS platforms and enterprise solutions. As a hands-on CTO and systems architect, he combines technical excellence with visionary leadership to drive organizational success.
