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 Partners, 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.
