Reduct

Reduct.Video was founded by Prabhas Pokharel (CEO) and Robert M. Ochshorn (CTO), who first met in high school in the U.S. (Rob was Prabhas's first American friend) and reconnected roughly a decade later in San Francisco. Ochshorn had been working in a computing-research lab led by Alan Kay and had built 'Gentle,' an open-source phoneme-level speech-to-text aligner that became a widely used industry-standard tool. Pokharel was at Stanford's d.school, where he became interested in ethnographic 'needs-finding' research methodology and the power of video for authentically representing human stories. Seeing what Gentle could do, the pair realized that word-level time-aligned transcripts could eliminate the two biggest barriers to video editing for non-professionals: the time it takes and the complexity of traditional NLE software. They built a three-day prototype in a San Jose garage in the fall of 2017 and landed their first paying customer the following week (notably, via Prabhas's professional network at IDEO, where he had worked/studied).

Reduct spent its early years serving UX/design researchers, marketers, and corporate teams who needed to make sense of hours of interview and meeting recordings — its 'Ctrl+F for video' pitch. On February 11, 2021, the company announced (via TechCrunch reporter Anthony Ha, and its own blog) that it had raised a $4 million round led by Greylock and South Park Commons, with participation from Figma CEO Dylan Field, then-Hopin CBO Armando Mann, and prominent angel/operator Elad Gil. At the time, Reduct's customers included Intuit, Autodesk, Facebook, Dell, Spotify, Indeed, Superhuman, IDEO, and Plaid, among others. Then-Greylock General Partner Sarah Guo was quoted in the announcement as Greylock's representative. This $4M round is the only funding event for Reduct confirmed via public reporting; extensive searching turned up no evidence of a subsequent priced round (Series A or later) — Greylock's own portfolio page still lists Reduct's 'First Partnered' stage as 'Seed,' consistent with no follow-on round being publicly disclosed. Total disclosed funding is therefore $4M, and no current valuation is publicly available.

Over 2022–2026, Reduct's product and go-to-market focus shifted substantially. While the core transcript-based editing/search/redaction technology stayed similar, the company's newsroom and case-study output from roughly 2023 onward is dominated by public-defense and criminal-legal-system customers: state and county public defender offices (e.g., Colorado State Public Defender, Missouri State Public Defender System, Michigan State Appellate Defender Office, Solano County, Lancaster County, Barrow County GA, Marion County OR), federal public defender offices (e.g., FPD Central District of California), bilingual/immigration-adjacent defense groups (Neighborhood Defender Service of Texas), a police-oversight body (Rochester Police Accountability Board), and individual criminal-defense attorneys — all using Reduct to transcribe, translate, search, and redact large volumes of bodycam and digital-discovery video. The company markets itself heavily at public-defender conferences (NAPD, NACDL, state bar CLEs) and has a 'Senior Resident Public Defender,' Jeff Sherr, on staff leading ethics/AI-adoption education for the defense bar. In a notable and unusual ethical policy move (exact date not confirmed but recent, referenced alongside other 2025–2026 content), Reduct announced it would 'cease all provision of services to law enforcement agencies, including District Attorneys' offices, and related prosecutorial entities engaged in adversarial criminal proceedings,' citing an unresolvable conflict of interest in serving both prosecution and defense on the same platform — a statement co-signed by both founders, confirming they remain active co-founders/leaders as of that announcement. As of Reduct's 2026 blog and newsroom content (e.g., presentations at the NAPD Changemakers Forum 2025/2026, MACDL Spring CLE 2026, and a Terms of Service update in November 2025), the company continues to operate as an active, apparently bootstrapped-since-seed private company headquartered in San Francisco.

Business model

B2B SaaS. Reduct sells seat-based subscriptions (Personal, Professional, Enterprise tiers) to organizations that need to transcribe, search, redact, translate, and edit large volumes of video/audio. Its largest current vertical is government/public-sector: public defender offices, criminal-defense attorneys, and police-oversight boards that need to process bodycam and digital-discovery footage.

Per-editor monthly/annual subscription pricing (e.g., $12/editor/mo Personal, $40/editor/mo Professional) bundled with a pooled annual transcription-hour quota and pay-as-you-go overages; Enterprise customers (incl. many government/public-defender offices) are sold seat-based, project-based, utilization-based, or unlimited custom plans starting at $75/editor/month with SSO, SOC2, HIPAA/GDPR compliance and signed MSAs.