Pika Announces $35 Million Series A

Pika, the company reimagining the entire video creation and editing experience with artificial intelligence, is going public. The launch took place alongside the announcement of a $35 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Pika Labs, founded by CEO Demi Guo and CTO Chenlin Meng, both former PhD students from Stanford University's renowned AI Labs, introduces Pika 1.0. It brings Pika to $55 million in the company's first six months. Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross led the Pre-Seed and Seed rounds. Additional investors include other prominent angel investors in the AI space such as Elad Gil, Adam D'Angelo (Quora), Andrej Karpathy, Clem Delangue (Hugging Face, Factorial Capital), Craig Kallman (Atlantic Records) and Alex Chung (Giphy). Startup firms such as Homebrew, Conviction Capital, SV Angel and Ben's Bites also participated.

The company said in a blog post. "Our vision for Pika is to enable everyone to be the director of their own stories and unleash the creator in each of us. Today we have reached a milestone that brings us closer to our vision."

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Pika Focuses on an Effortless and Accessible Video Creation and Editing Experience

The update introduces a new AI model that can create and edit videos in a variety of styles, including 3D animation, anime and cinematic genres. Pika's features allow users to create short, high-quality videos from text, image and video inputs, adjust camera movement and stretch videos to their desired length. Since launching in beta on Discord this April, Pika has grown to more than half a million users creating millions of videos every week.

Videos created by Pika have gained significant visibility on social media platforms, with the hashtag #pikalabs reaching nearly 30 million views on TikTok alone. While many AI video tools target professionals and commercial applications, Pika focuses on an effortless and accessible video creation and editing experience for ordinary consumers and creators. Pika aims to make everyone a creative director by democratising the creation of high-quality video content.