Pika’s Imagination Engine

Today, Lightspeed is announcing that we’re leading a $35M Series A in Pika, the company that’s redesigning the entire video-making and editing experience with AI. Founded by Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, Pika is making it possible for anyone to create high quality video through their state-of-the-art video model and creation platform, both of which also launch today. We’re joined by existing investors including Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Elad Gil, and are thrilled to support Pika on this next phase of their journey.

The creativity value gap

In 2023, video is arguably the most valuable form of media, with each and every one of us increasingly consuming more of it each day. More than ever before, we’re all heavily tuned in to a barrage of streaming services, TV shows, movies, podcasts, digital advertising, memes, and last but not least…short video clips on platforms like TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. This increase in video consumption has been driven by advancements in high speed internet, paired with ubiquitous access to data through the smartphones we all carry around in our pockets.

The creation of content has also become easier. Over the past several decades, nearly all forms of creativity have been democratized by easy to use software and platform agnostic creative tools. We now all have the ability to easily write blog posts, shoot stunning photos, and even record podcasts. Like these mediums, video, too, has also become easier to create. Yet, compared to all other forms of media, the process for creating high quality video assets still remains challenging and inaccessible for the masses. Sure, we can shoot videos on our smartphones and upload them to YouTube. But making professional grade films or animation remains out of reach for most.

AI, of course, is in the process of making all of the above far easier. Just as other new AI products have done for text, image, and audio generation, professional-quality video creation will also become democratized by generative AI. And given video’s ubiquitous appeal relative to other forms of creativity, the opportunity in eliminating this gap between creation and value is staggering.

Pro-quality video creation for everyone

Enter Pika, the company that’s redesigning the entire video-making and editing experience with AI. While other platforms are focused on enabling pros and enterprises, Pika makes high quality video creation accessible for all creators, regardless of their innate talent, education, access to hardware, or mastery of complicated software. In under 6 months in beta, Pika has already empowered more than 500,000 people to bring their creative vision to life and attracted tens of millions of views on TikTok and other video platforms.

Through Pika, which officially launches today, anyone can generate short video clips in virtually any creative style within seconds, just by typing a few lines of text or uploading an image. Powered by their new, state of the art video model 1.0, Pika is able to achieve a level of quality and precision only previously possible through professional video creation. Through both simple prompting or their powerful, yet intuitive UI, Pika enables anyone to:

• Generate high quality videos out of thin air, just by typing
• Extend videos to any length (by adding 4 seconds at a time, infinitely to any clip)
• Modify aspects of any video instantly through inpainting
• Extend videos to any content or aspect ratio through outpainting
• And even adjust camera movement

All of this is accessible through Pika’s new 1.0 model, available on both their own web app (which launches for the first time ever today) and their Discord server (which emerges from beta today), both offering the same groundbreaking capability for anyone.

While Pika is just launching publicly today for the first time ever, the story of Pika was already being written a long time ago…

Origins of the world’s best AI video team

Founders Demi Guo and Chelin Meng were all but destined to build Pika. Both spent their earliest years aspiring to pursue creative careers. For Demi, writing was her passion, and she dreamed of directing her creativity energy towards poetry. Like poems, Demi’s passion ultimately flowed and weaved and transformed – in this case from writing into computer programming, which she felt mirrored poetry in that they both required a level of abstract thinking and system design. And for Chenlin, the dream was to grow up to become an animator. She was inspired by films by studios like Pixar, and imagined one day growing up to create similar work herself. Like Demi, Chenlin’s passion would ultimately lead her to computer programming. For both, extremely impressive academic and professional achievements would soon follow.

Demi’s academics led her to complete her Ph.D. at Stanford University, co-advised by renowned professors Chris Manning and Ron Fedkiw. She also obtained a BA in Mathematics and an MA in Computer Science from Harvard University, with over 10 published papers. Her talent was further recognized through a Silver Medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics, first-place victories at the USA Computing Olympiad, and selection for the International Math Olympiad team. Along the way, she gained valuable professional experience, including AI-oriented internships at top-tier companies like Quora, Google Brain, Microsoft, Tencent, and Bytedance.

Chenlin began her undergraduate studies at Stanford University, where she completed a BA in Mathematics, rapidly advancing to graduate-level courses in her freshman year. Under the mentorship of Professor Stefano Ermon, she published five papers on generative AI as an undergrad. Continuing her journey at Stanford for her CS Ph.D., she authored over 30 papers in three years, significantly contributing to the field with her co-authorship of the DDIM paper, a key method in content generation used in AI models like OpenAI’s DALLE-2, Google’s Imagen, and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion. Her professional experiences at Google Brain and Stability AI further cemented her profound impact in AI research, all before Pika.

When finally deciding to start Pika as an extension of their early creative ambitions, their experiences led them to recruit other incredibly talented team members, including Karli Chen, who joined the team as the third co-founder and founding engineer. Karli completed their MA in Machine Learning and Computer Vision at Carnegie Mellon University.  Even as an undergraduate, they demonstrated exceptional skills by working as a Machine Learning Engineer for three years at SenseTime, a leading computer vision startup. Their aptitude for technology was evident early on; in high school, they were among the top 12 finalists for the Chinese Informatics Olympiad (IOI) team and one of the top 50 finalists for the Chinese Physics Olympiad (IPhO) team, showcasing their prowess in both informatics and physics at a national level.

Given such an impressive collection of foundational experiences, rooted in an early passion for creativity, the Pika team seems destined to change how we all share our stories visually.

The future of video creation

At Lightspeed, we couldn’t be more excited to partner with Pika and support their mission to allow anyone to bring their creative vision to life. And we’re thrilled to be investing alongside other amazing investors at the forefront of AI, including Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Elad Gil, Adam D’Angelo (Founder and CEO of Quora), Alex Chung (Co-Founder of Giphy), Clem Delangue (Co-Founder / CEO of Hugging Face and Partner at Factorial Capital), Andrej Karpathy, Craig Kallman (CEO of Atlantic Records), Keith Peiris (Co-Founder / CEO of Tome), Mateusz Staniszewski (Co-Founder / CEO of ElevenLabs), Aravind Srinivas (Co-Founder / CEO of Perplexity), as well as funds such as Ben’s Bites, Conviction, Homebrew, SV Angel, and others.

Through Pika, now anyone can become a video creator and bring their vision to life through the world’s most powerful AI video platform. We can’t wait to see the stories you all create as a result. You can join the waitlist for Pika 1.0 at pika.art.

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Want to help build the world’s most advanced AI video platform? Pika is hiring for a number of high-impact, founding roles.