Pika Labs Secures $55M Funding and Unveils AI Video Platform to Compete with Runway

Pika Labs Secures $35 Million Series A Funding and Launches Pika 1.0 Video AI Platform

Today, Pika Labs, a video AI startup founded six months ago, announced a successful $35 million Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. This funding, combined with earlier investments, brings the total raised by the company to $55 million.

The company also introduced Pika 1.0, a new web platform that builds on its beta release, allowing users to easily generate and edit videos in various styles, including 3D animation, anime, and cinematic production—all from simple text prompts.

This announcement highlights the rapid advancements in AI-driven video generation, positioning Pika against competitors like Runway and Stability AI. Adobe is also exploring this space, developing tools for video generation and editing.

Pika’s platform is already being utilized by over half a million users and is now open for sign-ups, empowering everyone to become creative video directors and producers.

What to Expect from Pika 1.0

Pika was co-founded by Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, former Ph.D. students from Stanford's AI Lab, who launched the initial version of Pika on Discord in late 2023. The platform has transformed into a powerful tool, generating millions of videos weekly, with top users spending up to 10 hours daily on content creation.

The company attracted substantial investor interest, raising $20 million across pre-seed and seed rounds led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, with participation from notable investors like Elad Gil, Adam D’Angelo, and Andrej Karpathy.

“We built Pika to simplify high-quality content creation for everyone, from casual users to film professionals. Our goal is to empower anyone to direct their stories and unleash their creativity,” stated CEO Demi Guo.

With Pika 1.0, users can now create and edit higher-quality videos through an easy web interface, moving away from the Discord app. By inputting desired styles, users can generate results within seconds, creating 3D animations, live-action clips, and cinematic videos. The platform enables transformations of moving objects and more, utilizing intuitive text prompts.

In addition to text-to-video capabilities, Pika 1.0 also supports image-to-video and video-to-video functionalities, allowing users to transform existing content into various styles. For example, users can animate a meme or convert a live-action video into an animated format. Users can upload content and manipulate it by expanding the canvas or aspect ratio, adding new objects, props, or characters to enhance their videos.

How to Access Pika 1.0

According to Pika Labs, the new platform will be available on Discord and through a dedicated website, accessible on both mobile and desktop devices. Interested users can sign up on the website. However, since Pika 1.0 is still being rolled out, access will be granted gradually to avoid system overload.

Growing Competition in the Video AI Space

With this additional funding, bringing Pika Labs' total capital to $55 million and its valuation to nearly $200 million, the company has established itself as a significant player in the evolving video AI landscape. Recently, Stability AI launched Stable Video Diffusion models that can generate high-quality clips from images, though with limitations on video length.

Pika’s tool stands out by producing longer clips and extending the length of uploaded videos. However, user experiences regarding the quality of extended content remain to be seen.

Other competitors in the video AI arena include Runway, known for enhancing memes' virality, and Adobe, which is developing capabilities like video upscaling and object editing for its Creative Cloud products. Adobe has also acquired Rephrase AI to bolster its video generation offerings.