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David Zitoun
Co-founder and CEO · Submagic
AI video editing Bootstrapped growth
Zitoun built Submagic into an AI captioning tool with about $8 million in annual recurring revenue and 13 staff without outside funding, a rare case of a bootstrapped AI app growing that fast.
“We focused on one thing and tried to do it better than anyone else: subtitles,” David Zitoun has said of Submagic, the Paris, France company he co-founded and runs as CEO. Its AI video editor adds animated captions, b-roll, and edits to short-form videos for creators and brands.
Affiliate Marketing Roots
Before Submagic, Zitoun worked as an affiliate for other businesses, and he used that experience when the company started with no budget. “At the beginning of Submagic we had zero euros to invest into marketing,” he told GetLatka. He launched an affiliate program about 30 days after the first customer and seeded it with a short he made himself, which drew about 100,000 views.
From First Customer to $8 Million
Zitoun and Tsi-fei Chan founded Submagic in early 2023. It won its first customer on May 1, 2023, and “We hit a million in ARR three months exactly after we got our first customers,” Zitoun told GetLatka. By June 2025 he put annual recurring revenue at $8 million.
The affiliate program pays 30% of a customer's lifetime value for as long as that customer stays, and Zitoun said it had more than 10,000 affiliates and drove 20% of revenue.
A Small Team by Design
Submagic has 13 people, all remote, working across product, marketing, and customer experience. “Without AI we should have been maybe 40 in the company, or 50 people, to do what we do,” Zitoun said, and he told GetLatka he takes five to six user calls a day.
