Vidzly Wins Google Gemini Special Category Award – Track 2

Another Win for Vidzly

We're thrilled to announce that Vidzly has won the Google Gemini Special Category Award – Track 2, earning $10,000 in Gemini API credits in the Creative category. This recognition highlights how Vidzly pushes the boundaries of what's possible when AI meets video creation—and it comes on the heels of our 1st Prize for Creativity at the Agents & MCP Hackathon, making it a powerful double validation of the project and the team behind it.

The Google Gemini Special Category Awards recognize projects that use Gemini in innovative, category-defining ways. Track 2 focuses on creative applications: tools and products that help people tell stories, express ideas, and produce content that would otherwise require expensive software or years of practice. For Vidzly to be selected in the Creative category means that what we built—an AI Co-Pilot that turns raw footage into short-form video in minutes—resonates with Google's vision of AI as an enabler of creativity at scale.

What is Vidzly?

Vidzly is our AI Co-Pilot that transforms raw video footage into engaging short-form content. Creators upload their clips, optionally describe the mood or style they want, and Vidzly handles the rest: video analysis, script generation, thumbnail creation, and composition—all orchestrated in a parallel workflow so that what used to take hours in an edit suite now takes minutes in the browser.

We built Vidzly because we saw a gap: millions of people want to make short-form video, but traditional editing is slow and steep to learn. Vidzly doesn't replace the creator; it amplifies them. The AI suggests cuts, pacing, and thumbnails, but the human stays in control of the vision. That balance—automation without losing creativity—is what we aimed for, and it's what the Gemini Special Award is recognizing.

Why Gemini?

Gemini is at the heart of Vidzly's pipeline. We use it for video summarization—understanding what's in each clip, which moments matter, and what mood or theme to emphasize. We use it for script generation—turning that understanding into a composition plan: scene order, transitions, and timing. And we use it for thumbnail creation—picking frames and generating text and visuals that make people want to click.

Choosing Gemini wasn't just a technical decision; it was a product one. We needed a model that could reason over long video context, follow creative instructions, and output structured data our pipeline could consume. Gemini's multimodal capabilities and API design made it possible to build Vidzly the way we imagined: fast, parallel, and creator-first. Winning the Special Category Award in the Creative track is a direct nod to that integration—and to the way we're using Gemini to unlock creativity instead of replacing it.

From Hackathon to Special Award

Vidzly first gained recognition when we won 1st Prize for Creativity at the Agents & MCP Hackathon 2025. That win validated the idea: the judges and community saw the same potential we did. The Google Gemini Special Category Award – Track 2 feels like the next chapter. It's not only about the product; it's about the stack. By awarding us $10,000 in Gemini API credits, Google is investing in Vidzly's continued development on their platform. We take that as both an honor and a responsibility—to keep improving Vidzly, to keep it open source, and to keep proving that AI can empower creators without replacing them.

What This Means

The $10,000 in Gemini API credits will go straight into Vidzly's evolution. We plan to use them to scale the product—more users, more concurrent jobs, more robust pipelines. We'll experiment with new Gemini capabilities as they ship: better long-context handling, richer multimodal outputs, and tighter integration with the rest of our stack. And we'll continue democratizing video creation: improving the Gradio UI, refining the MCP tools, and documenting everything so that others can build on top of Vidzly or learn from it.

We're grateful to Google and the Gemini team for this support and for recognizing creativity built on their platform. Awards like this remind us that the best use of AI isn't to automate away creativity—it's to put powerful tools in the hands of more people so they can tell their own stories.

What's Next

We're not stopping here. Vidzly remains open source, and we're committed to iterating in the open: better defaults, more export options, and deeper Gemini integration. If you're a creator, a developer, or someone who's curious about AI-powered video tools, we invite you to try Vidzly, star the repo, and share feedback. The credits from this award will help us run Vidzly at scale and explore features we couldn't afford to test before—so the whole community benefits.

Learn More

Want to dive deeper into Vidzly? Our project page covers the full architecture, technology stack, and all available MCP tools. And if you're curious how we got here, our earlier post about winning 1st Prize at the Agents & MCP Hackathon walks through the challenge, the build, and the team behind it.

Explore the Vidzly project → · Agents & MCP Hackathon win →

The Team

This achievement wouldn't have been possible without the dedication of our amazing team. From the first hackathon prototype to the Gemini Special Award, the same people have been pushing Vidzly forward—designing the pipeline, integrating Gemini, and keeping the project open and accessible. Thank you to everyone who contributed, tested, and believed in the idea.

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