Insider Brief
- Pika, a company focused on simplifying video creation, has grown to half a million users in six months, with users generating millions of videos per week, and has now launched Pika 1.0, a major upgrade featuring a new AI model for diverse video styles and an improved web experience.
- The company has raised $55 million in funding, including rounds led by Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with support from notable industry leaders and AI experts.
- Pika expresses gratitude for the support from its academic advisors, users, investors, and advisors, and invites passionate individuals to join their team to further explore the convergence of AI and creativity.
PRESS RELEASE — US/November 28, 2023 — Video is at the heart of entertainment, yet the process of making high-quality videos to date is still complicated and resource-intensive. When we started Pika six months ago, we wanted to push the boundaries of technology and design a future interface of video making 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.
Our vision for Pika is to enable everyone to be the director of their own stories and to bring out the creator in each of us. Today, we reached a milestone that brings us closer to our vision. We are thrilled to unveil Pika 1.0, a major product upgrade that includes a new AI model capable of generating and editing videos in diverse styles such as 3D animation, anime, cartoon and cinematic, and a new web experience that makes it easier to use. You can join the waitlist for Pika 1.0 at https://pika.art.
We are also excited to announce our fundraising milestones: we have raised $55 million, initiated with pre-seed and seed rounds led by Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross, and our Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Our investors also include Elad Gil, Adam D’Angelo (Founder and CEO of Quora), Zach, Andrej Karpathy, Clem Delangue (Co-Founder and CEO of Hugging Face and Partner at Factorial Capital), Craig Kallman (CEO of Atlantic Records), Alex Chung (Co-Founder of Giphy), Aravind Srinivas (CEO of Perplexity), Vipul Ved Prakash (CEO of Together), Mateusz Staniszewski (CEO of ElevenLabs), and Keith Peiris (CEO of Tome), as well as venture firms such as Homebrew, Conviction Capital, SV Angel, and Ben’s Bites, alongside many other esteemed industry leaders and AI experts.
We are humbled to reach this milestone, and we couldn’t be happier to share Pika 1.0 with everyone. We would also like to thank our academic advisors at Stanford and Harvard, including Chris Manning, Ron Fedkiw, Stefano Ermon and Alexander Rush, who have continued to support us as company academic advisors. We’re also grateful for our users, investors, advisors and all the supporters along the way.
As a small and dynamic team, we’re looking for passionate and driven individuals to join us on this exciting journey to push the limits of AI and creativity. You can explore our open roles here.
To stay up to date on the latest about Pika, follow @pika_labs on X, join our Discord community and access our beta product here, and join the waitlist for the new Pika 1.0 at https://pika.art.
Featured image: Credit: Pika Labs
