Pika, an AI video platform transforming the video creation and editing experience, has secured $35 million in its Series A funding round. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the funding round with participation from notable AI-focused angel investors and venture firms. This includes Elad Gil, Adam D’Angelo, Andrej Karpathy, Clem Delangue, Craig Kallman, Alex Chung, Homebrew, Conviction Capital, SV Angel, and Ben’s Bites.
Video is a popular creative medium across social media, entertainment, and education, but its creation is often complex and resource-intensive. Unlike other AI video tools targeting professionals and commercial users, Pika offers a user-friendly video-making and editing experience accessible to everyday consumers and creators. Pika aims to empower anyone to be a creative director effortlessly.
Demi Guo, Pika co-founder and CEO, said in a statement:
My Co-Founder and I are creatives at heart. We know firsthand that making high-quality content is difficult and expensive, and we built Pika to give everyone, from home users to film professionals, the tools to bring high-quality video to life. Our vision is to enable anyone to be the director of their stories and to bring out the creator in all of us.”
In the company’s first six months, Pika raised $55 million, including pre-seed and seed rounds led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Pika’s initial beta version debuted on Discord in late April 2023 and currently boasts over 500,000 users, generating millions of videos weekly. Dedicated Pika users on Discord spend up to 10 hours crafting videos using the platform daily. Moreover, Pika-generated content has achieved viral status on social media, with the #pikalabs hashtag amassing nearly 30 million views on TikTok alone.
Pika has also introduced Pika 1.0, a significant product upgrade featuring:
- Enhanced generative AI for higher-quality videos.
- New editing options powered by AI:
- Text-to-Video and Image-to-Video: Input text or upload images to create short, high-quality videos.
- Video-to-Video: Transform existing videos into different styles while maintaining their structure.
- Expand: Change video formats like from TikTok’s 9:16 to widescreen 16:9.
- Change: AI-powered edits like altering clothing or adding new elements.
- Extend: Lengthen existing video clips using AI.
- Updated web interface: Now accessible for mobile and desktop users on Discord and web.
