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Today, Pika Labs, a young video AI startup just six months old, announced it has raised $35 million in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Including earlier side rounds, this brings their total funding to $55 million.
The company also launched Pika 1.0, a new web platform that builds upon its earlier beta version. This platform allows users to generate and edit videos in various styles like 3D animation, anime, and cinematic just from text prompts. You can check out some examples in the promotional video Pika has released.
This development puts Pika Labs in direct competition with other AI-driven video creation tools from companies like Runway and Stability AI. Adobe is also exploring similar technology with a suite of tools designed to generate and edit objects in videos.
According to Pika Labs, over half a million people are already using their product, and it is open for sign-ups. They plan to make it gradually available to users, empowering everyone to become a creative video director and producer.
The latest version, Pika 1.0, launched by Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng—former Ph.D. students at Stanford’s AI Lab—has evolved into a sophisticated tool generating millions of videos each week. Top users on Discord spend up to 10 hours a day creating videos. The company had previously raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed rounds, led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, with participation from investors like Elad Gil, Adam D’Angelo, and others.
Guo, the CEO, stated that Pika was built to make high-quality content creation accessible and affordable for everyone, from home users to film professionals. The aim is to enable anyone to direct their stories and bring out their creativity.
Pika 1.0, powered by a new AI model, offers a user-friendly web interface for creating and editing high-quality videos with simple text prompts. Users can create 3D animations, live-action content, cinematic videos, and even modify moving objects like a horse or an outfit with ease.
Besides text-to-video functionality, Pika 1.0 also supports image-to-video and video-to-video capabilities, allowing users to transform existing content into various video styles. For example, users can bring a meme to life or convert a cinematic video into an animated one. Text prompts can be used to perform edits like expanding the canvas or changing the aspect ratio, and even adding new objects, props, and characters.
Interested users can access Pika 1.0 through Discord and a dedicated website. Although you can sign up now, the advanced features won’t be available immediately as there is a waitlist to help manage demand.
With $55 million in total funding, Pika Labs is positioning itself as a significant player in the increasingly competitive video AI space. Recently, Stability AI introduced Stable Video Diffusion models for generating high-quality video clips from images, though they are limited by video length. Pika’s tool, however, can generate longer clips and even extend existing videos, though the quality of these extended videos remains to be seen.
Other key players in this space include Runway and Adobe. Runway is known for adding motion to memes, while Adobe is experimenting with video upscaling and object editing in its Creative Cloud products. Adobe has also acquired Rephrase AI to enhance its video-generation capabilities.