Ai Company Pika Raises $55m To Redesign Video Making And Editing

By Author: Arina Smith
Total Articles: 185
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Pika, an innovative AI video platform, recently announced its Series A funding round, securing $35 million led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. This follows earlier successful funding rounds, including Pre-Seed and Seed rounds that accumulated a total of $55 million. The initial investment rounds were led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, with additional support from renowned angel investors in AI, such as Elad Gil, Adam D’Angelo, Andrej Karpathy, Clem Delangue, Craig Kallman, and Alex Chung. Venture firms like Homebrew, Conviction Capital, SV Angel, and Ben’s Bites also contributed.

Pika introduced a significant product upgrade, Pika 1.0, featuring an advanced AI model capable of generating and editing videos in various styles like 3D animation, anime, and cinematic formats. The release also includes a revamped web experience for improved usability. The beta version of Pika, initially launched on Discord in April 2023, has rapidly gained popularity, boasting over 500,000 users generating millions of videos weekly. Notably, top users spend up to 10 hours a day creating videos on Pika, and content generated on the platform ...
... has garnered attention on social media platforms like TikTok, where the #pikalabs hashtag has nearly 30 million views.

Pika's vision is to simplify video creation, making it accessible to a broad audience. The platform is designed to empower both casual users and professionals, enabling them to become creative directors. The company's CEO, Demi Guo, emphasized the founders' creative background and the mission to democratize high-quality video production.

Pika 1.0 introduces several features, including a new generative AI model for higher-quality video creation and novel editing capabilities. Users can leverage Text-to-Video and Image-to-Video functionalities, allowing short video creation based on typed text or uploaded images. Video-to-Video enables the transformation of existing videos into different styles while maintaining the original structure. Other features include Expand, Change, and Extend, offering versatile editing options. Pika 1.0 is accessible on both Discord and the web at https://pika.art.

Michael Mignano, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, expressed confidence in Pika's transformative impact on video creation through generative AI, foreseeing democratization similar to what has occurred in text and image creation.

Pika was founded by Demi Guo, the CEO, and Chenlin Meng, the CTO, both former PhD students from Stanford University's AI Labs. Guo, previously employed by Meta AI Research, won international awards in software development as a college sophomore. Meng, with a rich research background, contributed significantly to AI advancements, including the Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM), widely used in content generation.

Pika is positioned as an AI video platform catering to diverse creators, streamlining the video-making and editing experience. The company continues to attract attention and is actively hiring for various roles.

For more information, you can visit Pika's web platform at https://pika.art or explore career opportunities at https://pika.art/careers. Stay updated by following @pika_labs on social media.