Pika Labs launches Pika 1.0, raises $55M
Founded by two Stanford computer-science PhD students, the video-editing app had already drawn some 500,000 users through its earlier Discord-only release.
- Models & capabilities
- Money & business
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Pika Labs, founded by Stanford computer science PhD students Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, launched Pika 1.0, a text-to-video generation and editing app, and disclosed $55 million raised across pre-seed, seed and Series A rounds. The Series A alone was $35 million, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; earlier rounds were led by former GitHub chief executive Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, who reportedly gave the founders access to a private GPU cluster.
Pika 1.0 moved the product beyond its original Discord-only interface to a standalone web app, and added the ability to edit elements within a generated video — changing an object’s style, extending a shot, or adjusting aspect ratio — rather than only generating a clip from a prompt. Forbes reported that around 500,000 people had used the tool in the roughly six months since its earlier Discord release, generating what the company said were millions of videos weekly. The product remained free at launch, with the company saying it planned to introduce paid tiers later.
The raise put Pika alongside Runway as one of the best-funded pure-play video-generation startups, at a moment when text-to-video was moving from a research curiosity — exemplified a few months later by OpenAI’s Sora demo — into a competitive product category with venture money attached.