Challenge

VEED’s cofounders, Sabba Keynejad and Tim Mamedov, met at an online hackathon and began working together on a video editing tool in 2018. Their goal was to democratize visual content by making it easier for anyone to create a video, and they used their personal savings to kick-start their company.

Within a year of launching the tool, Keynejad and Mamedov had built VEED into a formidable contender in the video creation space, with a base of 35,000 active monthly users that was growing by 60% each month. Startup accelerator Y Combinator took notice and invited the pair to Silicon Valley to pitch their concept in person. However, when the pair arrived at the meeting, the Y Combinator partners—despite their interest—questioned VEED’s viability due to its lack of revenue (the tool was free for all users at the time), and ultimately turned them down.

Spurred by the rejection, the cofounders dove into a 48-hour sprint to craft a recurring revenue model capable of converting dozens of users into paying subscribers, which they hoped would earn them another meeting with Y Combinator before they returned to London. Achieving that goal required finding a payment and billing technology partner that offered developer-friendly and easy-to-implement technology.

At the same time, the pair was thinking beyond initial monetization and wanted a payment and billing provider with solutions for challenges a fast-growing AI business might face—including the flexibility to add subscription tiers as VEED’s user base evolved and a range of payment methods to serve a global audience. That meant finding a partner with a suite of robust features and nimble technology that could scale with the company as it grew.

Solution

VEED immediately turned to Stripe to implement a billing solution. “Everyone knows you use Stripe,” said Keynejad. “It’s the only option that’s dev-friendly.” As engineers, the company’s cofounders appreciated the accurate, thorough, and easy-to-understand nature of Stripe’s documentation; its user-friendly API; and its ability to manage recurring payments.

The company integrated Stripe Billing into VEED’s platform over a “wild weekend of coding,” as Keynejad called it, which resulted in 20 paying users by the following Monday morning. While it didn’t convince Y Combinator to fund them, it set VEED on a trajectory of significant growth. Stripe Billing offered powerful tools to automate the subscription lifecycle, including signing up new subscribers, managing recurring billing, and handling renewals or cancellations. In addition, Billing’s support for flexible subscription modeling had enabled VEED to test new pricing models and update its subscription tiers as the company continued to grow.

The close integration between Billing and Stripe Payments also allowed VEED to take advantage of built-in authorization optimizations and recovery tools to help reduce failed payments. For example, the company used card account updater, which automatically updates card details for customer cards that have expired or been replaced; Adaptive Acceptance, which uses AI to identify and retry false declines in real time; network tokens, which replace a card’s primary account number with a unique, secure identifier—enabling seamless payment processing; and Smart Retries, which addresses insufficient funds declines by identifying the optimal day and time to retry a payment.

More recently, VEED used Stripe’s Payment Element, a secure, embeddable UI component, to enable several payment methods—including credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and iDEAL.

To further enhance its payment success rate, VEED now relies on Stripe Radar for Fraud Teams to combat fraud. Stripe’s built-in Radar fraud detection employs AI models trained on millions of global transactions to analyze VEED’s transaction data for shifting fraud patterns and potentially risky transactions. Radar for Fraud Teams builds on that foundation by making it easy for nontechnical Stripe users at VEED to create customized rules and instantly change them when needed.

Results

$1 million in annual revenue within 1 year of integrating Billing

With Billing, VEED went from a free tool to a company with $1 million in annual recurring revenue in less than a year. As of June 2025, the company had exceeded $40 million in ARR from nearly 200,000 paying subscribers.

“We benefit hugely from having Stripe handle all of our payments and billing,” said Jurn van Wissen, senior product manager at VEED. “It’s very easy to work with Stripe’s APIs. It takes away a lot of the headache of monetizing a startup like this.”

Ease of experimentation now allows VEED to adapt to changing billing needs

Stripe Billing’s flexible subscription modeling capabilities have allowed VEED to try different approaches and refine its offerings, improving profitability while providing the tools customers want at prices they can afford. “Our monetization team runs around 50 experiments each year,” said van Wissen. “Stripe makes it convenient to set up, manage, and grandfather SKUs so we can test pricing and packaging.”

Going forward, VEED will continue to rely on Stripe technology to optimize its pricing. “We will likely experiment with usage-based billing and metering,” said van Wissen. “With AI making workflows more efficient, professional videos that used to require a whole team can now be created by a single user who isn’t an expert in video editing. That’s why a lot of AI video companies are experimenting with value metrics.”

$1.6 million annual revenue uplift from Stripe authorization optimizations

Using Stripe Adaptive Acceptance, card account updater, and network tokens has helped VEED generate $1.6 million per year in revenue through improved acceptance rates. “That number speaks for itself,” said van Wissen. “It’s great to have Stripe working in the background to recover that type of revenue and reduce our delinquent churn. It’s one less thing for us to have to worry about.”

$1.8 million in recovered payments from Smart Retries

Using Smart Retries has helped VEED optimize its failed payment recovery strategy. In the last year alone, Smart Retries recovered $1.8 million in failed payments.

Adding payment methods increases revenue and sets the stage for international expansion

Adding payment methods besides credit cards has helped VEED increase conversions and revenue, said van Wissen. Now, roughly 20% of the company’s payments come through methods outside of credit cards.

VEED plans to focus on adding more local payment methods and currencies to strengthen its share in key growth markets, including ACH in the US, SEPA instant credit transfer in the EU, and Pix in Brazil.

“With the Payment Element, you can just toggle payment methods on and off within the Stripe UI,” said van Wissen. “It saves a lot of engineering time. And you benefit from having something that’s optimized out of the box.”

Radar for Fraud Teams makes fraud a nonissue

VEED has customized its use of Radar for Fraud Teams, testing and refining rules with the goal of catching fraud early while not triggering too many false positives. “It’s been working very well for us,” said van Wissen. “Stripe automatically classifies transaction risk based on the huge amount of data it tracks across all Stripe transactions, so you don’t have to analyze fraud signals yourself.”