Quick answer
Nina Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Bevyl, a New York AI startup that turns a brand’s raw footage into on-brand short-form videos. Before Bevyl she founded Kite Beauty, a makeup brand for busy people that launched in 2022. She studied economics at Cornell and earned an MBA from Wharton, and she says she left a corporate consulting job to start Bevyl as a non-technical founder. In June 2026 Bevyl raised a $1.3 million seed round with HearstLab and Launchpad Venture Group participating. She posts about building an AI company on TikTok as @automatewithnina.
Nina Liu did not know how to code when she decided to build an AI company. What she did know was the problem. As the founder of a small beauty brand, she needed a steady stream of short-form video and did not have the time or budget to edit it all.
So she built a scrappy prototype, tested it on her own brand, and then went looking for a technical co-founder. That project became Bevyl, an AI video-editing platform for brands and agencies. Today Liu is its CEO, and on @automatewithnina on TikTok she shares what she calls “the ugly side of building a startup,” from investor rejections to moving back in with her parents to fund it.
Key takeaways
- Nina Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Bevyl, an AI platform that edits a brand’s real footage into on-brand short-form videos for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts.
- She previously founded Kite Beauty, a makeup brand designed for busy lifestyles that launched in May 2022 after three years of development.
- She holds a BA in economics from Cornell and an MBA from Wharton, where she founded the Wharton Beauty Club in 2020.
- Bevyl raised a $1.3 million seed round in June 2026, with HearstLab and Launchpad Venture Group participating.
- On TikTok she documents life as a non-technical, female AI founder, including moving home at 32 to save money for the company.
Who is Nina Liu?
Liu is a New York-based founder who has now started two companies in two very different industries. Her TikTok bio sums up the path: CEO and founder of Bevyl, former beauty founder at Kite Beauty, and “Cornell | Wharton | NYC.”
According to the Wharton Beauty Club, she worked in consulting and finance before becoming a founder, holds a BA in economics from Cornell and an MBA from Wharton, and founded the Wharton Beauty Club in 2020. In her videos, she says her most recent corporate job before Bevyl was at Accenture.
What was Kite Beauty?
Kite Beauty was Liu’s first company: makeup “designed for busy lifestyles and tiny purses,” in the words of the Wharton event listing. The brand launched in May 2022 after three years of development, and it is vegan, cruelty-free, made in the USA and based in New York City. On its website, Kite describes itself as a minority-founded brand and is candid about its limits, saying that as “a small, independent startup” it could not yet afford the shade range of big brands.
Running a beauty brand also gave Liu her next idea. Like most direct-to-consumer brands, Kite needed short-form video to sell, and editing it took more time than a small team had.
What is Bevyl and how does it work?
Bevyl calls itself a “taste-powered AI video-editing strategist.” Brands upload raw footage, and Bevyl learns their voice, tone and visual style from their brand kit, then cuts, sequences and adds text to produce on-brand short-form videos. Its site says a first finished short takes a few minutes, and it offers use cases such as product videos, ad creative, UGC-style ads and turning long videos into shorts.
One choice sets it apart from many AI video tools: Bevyl does not generate video from scratch. Liu argues that AI-generated people are not convincing enough to sell products yet, and that real people in real situations still perform better. “It’s still easier to just have a real person in a video,” she says, “and then use AI to actually video edit down that real footage.”
Do you think creators will ever be fully replaced by AI?
How did a non-technical founder build an AI startup?
Liu is direct about the fact that she is not an engineer. Her advice to other non-technical founders starts with the problem, not the code. “The number one thing that I did was I just found a problem that I personally had,” she says. She built “a scrappy proof of concept,” tested it on her own beauty brand, and only then, with real evidence that it worked, started looking for a CTO and preparing to quit her job.
Her view is that AI has made this path more open, not less. “AI actually, I feel like, has democratized starting a startup, not gatekept it,” she says. In other videos she argues that you do not need a technical degree to use AI well, just basic management skills, and she shares the ways her team uses AI tools to save hours of manual work each week.
How I raised over $1 million as a non-technical founder
How did Bevyl raise its seed round?
In a pinned video, Liu says she left her corporate job, started an AI company and raised more than $1 million, all within about six months. In June 2026, Signalbase reported that Bevyl had closed a $1.3 million seed round with HearstLab, Hearst’s investment program for women-led startups, and Launchpad Venture Group participating, and listed Liu as CEO and co-founder and Noah Lindner as CTO.
HearstLab’s comment on the deal pointed to how fast the team moved: “In just six months, the Bevyl team bootstrapped an incredibly compelling product, earning 90% first-pass approval rates.” The road there was not smooth. Liu has said it took about 50 investor meetings that went nowhere before she realized her generic pitch was wasting her time and started qualifying investors before she pitched.
The ugly side of building a startup
What sacrifices did Nina Liu make to start Bevyl?
Liu’s most personal videos are about the parts of founding a company that rarely make it onto LinkedIn. She says that a year before Bevyl took off she was in a “mind numbing corporate job” and fresh out of a breakup. To fund the leap, she moved back home with her parents at 32 for six months to save money and sold much of her wardrobe on Poshmark.
She also describes deliberately “burning the boats”: signing a 12-month New York lease right before quitting her job, so that the fear of failing would push her to work harder. Today, she says, she runs a VC-backed AI company with a team that is more than 90% women, and she credits luck, help from others and a lot of unseen work for getting there.
The truth behind moving home at 32 and building Bevyl
Why does Nina Liu talk about being a female founder in AI?
A recurring theme on her channel is the “tech bro” culture of AI startups and what it is like to build outside it. She talks about being underestimated, about how to respond when someone talks over you in a meeting, and about being a 33-year-old founder “in a sea of 25-year-olds,” which she argues should be an advantage, not a disadvantage. “Your experience is your edge,” she writes.
She also leans into a brand that does not look like a typical AI company. Bevyl’s own TikTok calls it a “favorite girlie tech company.” Liu says she built it that way on purpose, because it felt authentic. Her approach to sales follows the same instinct: lead with the customer’s problems, not your product, and show up in person instead of “throwing software over the fence.”
She joins a group of founders and investors we have profiled who are building in public, including Shruti Merchant and Esther Crawford.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Nina Liu?
Nina Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Bevyl, an AI video-editing startup in New York. She previously founded the makeup brand Kite Beauty and holds degrees from Cornell and Wharton.
What does Bevyl do?
Bevyl is an AI video-editing platform for brands and agencies. It learns a brand’s style and turns raw footage into on-brand short-form videos for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts. It edits real footage rather than generating video from scratch.
How much funding has Bevyl raised?
Bevyl raised a $1.3 million seed round in June 2026, with HearstLab and Launchpad Venture Group participating, according to Signalbase.
What is Kite Beauty?
Kite Beauty is the makeup brand Nina Liu founded. It makes compact, vegan, cruelty-free makeup designed for busy lifestyles and launched in May 2022.
Is Nina Liu a technical founder?
No. She describes herself as a non-technical founder. She built an early prototype, tested it on her own beauty brand, then brought on a technical co-founder.
Where can I follow Nina Liu?
She posts about building an AI startup on TikTok at @automatewithnina, and Bevyl posts at @editwithbevyl.
Follow Nina Liu
Nina Liu shares the real story of building an AI startup on @automatewithnina on TikTok. Learn more about Bevyl at Bevyl.
This profile is based on Nina Liu’s public TikTok videos, Bevyl’s website and published reports. Details she has shared about her own life are as she describes them. Booked Impact did not interview her, and she did not review this article before publication.
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