Descript, the audio- and video-editing platform created in 2017 by former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, has raised $50 million in a Series C round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, a tranche through which OpenAI and its partners, including Microsoft, invest in early-stage companies.

The platform was created as a separate company from Mason’s audio guide business Detour, which Bose acquired in 2018. The platform, aimed at podcasters and videographers who aren’t familiar with professional-level editing tools, allows users to create instant transcriptions of audio and video that can then be cut and matched with music, photos and other content using drag-and-drop tools.

Whenever you want your visuals to change, you just type a slash and then that creates this thing that we call a scene, which is like a slide in PowerPoint or Google Slides. You can drag B-roll or images onto your scene — including from our new stock media library — or apply a template, or add titles or text. Or you can use our AI green screen to remove your background and replace it with something else.

A new experience called “Scenes” allows users to split scenarios composed in write mode into scenes and then arrange the visuals in the same way they would work with slides in a deck. Scenes keeps the voice recordings from Overdub aligned with the script, allowing creators to swap in, for example, a clip with a final recording without worrying that the recordings will misalign.

More practically speaking, this partnership is going to mean some great new tools coming to Descript in the next year. The new version of Descript that we’re releasing today is really just laying the foundation for a new kind of video editor. We’re excited to keep building it with you.