What is Pika Labs?
What is Pika Labs?
The March of Generative A.I. in Video Continues as Pika Labs comes out of Stealth.
Hey Everyone,
I have the feeling that Pika Labs might lead to a Runway competitor.
The CEO of Pika Labs is Demi Guo, a PhD from Stanford. So on November 28th, 2023 they announced that it raised $55 million in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Homebrew, Conviction Capital, SV Angel, Ben’s Bites and notable angel investors including Quora founder Adam D’Angelo, ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Giphy co-founder Alex Chung. That’s quite an eclectic and yet somehow familiar group.
So Video marks the point where Generative A.I. really changes the internet in the future. Startups that specialize in Generative AI video content really could usher in a weird and different era.
The Information had mentioned them back in September, 2023.
Stanford University artificial intelligence PhD student Demi Guo founded Pika in late April under the name “Mellis Labs,” with fellow PhD student Chenlin Meng later joining as a cofounder.
I guess they have come out of stealth. Another computer science PhD.
Introducing Pika 1.0, the idea-to-video platform that brings your creativity to life. Create and edit your videos with AI. Rolling out to new users on web and discord, starting today. Sign up at
So let’s go!
Or see the launch Tweet.
Only in 2023 can a six month old stealth startup in the spirit of Runway, raise a $35 million in a series A round to bring their total to $55 million so quickly.
Analysts and enthusiast are gushing about what this might signal for the next era of AI generated Video.
Pika emerged from stealth and coincides with the early access launch of what Pika’s calling “Pika 1.0,” a new suite of videography tools that introduces a generative AI model capable of editing videos in a range of styles, like “3D animation,” “anime” and “cinematic.”
Pika is Trending
“Video is at the heart of entertainment, yet the process of making high-quality videos to date is still complicated and resource-intensive.”
So if you think of it, for 2023 this could be significant. Think about it, around a week after Stability AI announced Stable Diffusion Video, laying the groundwork for AI text-to-video generators, AI startup Pika Labs has announced that it has raised $55 million to push its competing generative video platform further.
Go big or go home, in April, 2023 Guo and Chenlin Meng, a fellow Ph.D. student, literally dropped out of Stanford to launch Pika to build an easier-to-use AI video generator.
Their AI video tool, Guo says, is not tailored for professionals: "What we’re trying to do is something more for everyday consumers — people like me and Chenlin."
So if Runway or Stability AI (likely to be acquired) miss the mark, Pika might be a step more advanced. And for innovation to occur these stealth startups need to show their cards near the end of 2023 or in early 2024. And I expect a lot of such Gen AI startups to show their light.
“Just as other new AI products have done for text and images, professional-quality video creation will also become democratized by generative AI. We believe Pika will lead that transformation,” Lightspeed’s Michael Mignano said in a press release. “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.”
Pika’s video generation tool has so far only been available through the social messaging app Discord.
Despite being pre-release for the last six months, Pika’s roughly half a million users have generated “millions of videos per week.”
Will Generative AI of Video be a Big Deal?
In a recent report, IDC projected that generative AI investments will rise from $16 billion this year to a whopping $143 billion in 2027. While generative AI accounts for just 9% of overall AI spending in 2023, the firm expects that'll increase to 28% within five years.
How might Alpha and GenZ interact with the next iteration of Gen AI apps? You have to think Pika has ByteDance type of vibes. U.S. universities are a hot bed of Chinese born talent and for all the A.I. researchers who are of Chinese origin, you sometimes have to wonder why they don’t build startups more often in the U.S.
Nat Friedman, who has emerged as one of the leading solo investors in the AI space since he departed GitHub in 2021, first invested in Pika back in April. So a lot actually happend in 2023 that we don’t yet know fully about in Gen AI.
What can be Made with Pika Labs Today?
Pika’s has in such a short time built a proprietary AI model for video, similar to OpenAI’s text-based GPT-4 or Midjourney’s image-based models.
Full List of Series A Backers Include:
The Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. And additional investors also include Elad Gil, Adam D’Angelo (Founder and CEO of Quora), Zach (Co-Founder of Ramp), 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 Partners, SV Angel, and Ben’s Bites, alongside many other esteemed industry leaders and AI experts.
So as you can see there is a snowball effect here of AI entrepreneur supporting new ones. These are Angels that have been fairly active in recent months since the advent of Generative A.I.
So fast forward six months the fresh Series A values Pika Labs at between $200 million and $300 million, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.
Runway and Stability AI aren’t exactly innovating at a frantic pace here, there’s room for many competitors in this space. And it is going to be a fairly lucrative space.
What is Pika 1.0?
So they also unveiled 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.
If you’d like to work at Pika you can check their career section here.
“One of the coolest things about Pika 1.0 is that it lets you upload your own video footage and use generative AI to edit and reimagine the scene.” - Tweet.
AI-Generated short film by Pika Labs:
Their headquarters (HQ) is based in Palo Alto, CA.
So we know that the product is good in comparison to how small the team is and how recently they were founded, it’s a huge sign. This team actually reminds me of Twelve Labs, which I have covered before. Twelve Labs is primarily Korean-American founders. They are also related to LLMs at the intersection of video.
It is said Guo and Meng’s rapid pace of development surprised investors — and themselves. I wonder what Adobe, STability A.I. and Runway are thinking. Competition in the space means Pika will be able to attract talent now from Meta (FAIR), Google and even OpenAI.
This is because Generative A.I. Video could be one of the hottest trends in 2024.
Meta, Google and even Stability AI haven’t done this space justice, maybe Pika and Runway will be different in 2024.