Pika, a platform that generates videos from simple images or captions, has announced it raised $55 million in funds supervised by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Notable companies like Homebrew, Conviction Capital, SV Angel, Ben’s Bites, and prominent angel investors—Quora founder Adam D’Angelo, ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and Giphy co-founder Alex Chung—participated in the funding round.
Six months ago, Pika introduced its “Pika 1.0,” an AI tool capable of editing videos in various formats, including “3D animation,” “anime,” and “cinematic.”
In a blog on its website, Pika regards videos as the heart of entertainment, stating that creating high-quality videos is a challenging task. It states, “When we started Pika six months ago, we aimed to push the boundaries of technology and design a future interface for video creation that is effortless and accessible to everyone. Since then, we’re proud to have grown the Pika community to half a million users who are generating millions of videos per week.”
Pika was founded by former Stanford PhD students Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, who previously worked in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Pika 1.0 seems to elevate Pika’s stature in the global market. It possesses a tool capable of transforming videos into different formats, such as converting “live action” to “animated”. Additionally, it can extend video length, expand its canvas, change characters’ clothing, and even add new people through AI.
Tech giants like Meta and Google are also developing AI tools for video editing. O’Reilly, in its 2023 generative AI report, stated that approximately 26% of tech companies are in the initial stages of deploying generative AI. However, they express significant concerns about potential unforeseen outcomes, including privacy, bias, and fairness.
