Recently Launched AI Video Platform’s User Surge Prompts $35 Million Series A

AI is a powerful tool that is now being applied across a broad spectrum of industries and within a range of products and services.?In the hands of creatives, it is almost a wonder as to what can now be done once AI is incorporated into a platform. That is the case of Pika, an AI video platform that is redesigning the video-making and editing experience.

“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,” said Demi Guo, Pika co-founder and CEO. “Our vision is to enable anyone to be the director of their stories and to bring out the creator in all of us.”

Guo and her co-founder & CTO Chenlin Meng are former students of Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. Meng is in Stanford’s undergraduate program, while Guo received her undergraduate degree from Harvard in mathematics concurrent with a Masters in computer science. She is working on her Phd in computer science at Stanford as well.

Prior to attending Stanford, Guo was the youngest full-time employee at Meta AI Research when a college sophomore, winning numerous international awards in software development. Chenlin has published more than 28 research papers in the last three years, a portion of which have been placed into use.

The high-tech entrepreneurial duo launched Pika just six months ago, yet have amassed a base of over a half a million users. The startup’s dramatic growth readily gained the support of venture capital, having just announced the closing of its Series A funding round of $35 million.?This adds to its Pre-seed and Seed rounds led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, bringing total funding to $55 million.

When a startup displays such evident high potential as Pika, some of the most accomplished and savvy tech investors and entrepreneurs are often involved.? For Pika, prominent participating angel investors include Elad Gil, Adam D’Angelo (Founder and CEO of Quora), Andrej Karpathy, Clem Delangue (Co-Founder and CEO of Hugging Face), Craig Kallman (Chairman and CEO of Atlantic Records) and Alex Chung (Co-Founder of Giphy). Venture firms include Homebrew, Conviction Capital, SV Angel and Ben’s Bites.

Pika distinguishes its platform from other AI video tools by designing its video-making and editing experience for everyday consumer and creative use, while competitors have narrowly pursued professionals and commercial users. Pika just announced Pika 1.0, an upgrade that includes a new AI model which generates and edits videos in styles such as 3D animation, anime or cinematic, while also providing an easier to use web experience. To join the web list, visit?https://pika.art.

Michael Mignano, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, shares the excitement of supporting the Pika co-founders and participating in the California-based startup’s funding that has attracted notable investors.

“Given such an impressive technical foundation, rooted in an early passion for creativity, the Pika team seems destined to change how we all share our stories visually. At Lightspeed, we couldn’t be more excited to support their mission to allow anyone to bring their creative vision to life through video, and we’re thrilled to be investing alongside other amazing investors at the forefront of AI.”