Pika Labs Looks Like Midjourney for Video, and it Just Raised $55M
Sharp images and more editing control are making Pika a hit
Pika Labs has announced a new $55 million funding round led by Lightspeed Ventures. That added to a $15 million pre-seed round in January and a round of $5 million a couple of months ago. Synthedia believes that means the company has raised $75 million in total, though Crunchbase added another $35 million in there, which appears to be a duplicate.
The company says it “has more than 500,000 users generating millions of videos each week. Top Pika users on Discord spend up to 10 hours a day creating videos.” That is up from 160,000 Discord users in September.
The funding news was coupled with the announcement of Pika 1.0, the company’s generative AI video solution. Note: There is a waitlist for access.
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. 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.
The company’s co-founders, Chenlin Meng and Demi Guo, both spent time at Stanford’s AI Lab, with Meng earning a Ph.D. in computer science and Guo on leave from her doctoral program while focusing on Pika. Guo also spent a year as a full-time employee at Facebook AI research in the middle of her undergraduate program at Harvard.
Sharp Graphics and Control
The graphics are very good and support a number of styles. It works similarly to AI text-to-image generators, but you won’t have to suffer through a Discord experience. Pika Labs offers a web app for creating your videos.
You may have seen a number of video generator demonstrations over the past year from Meta and Google. Pika 1.0 is a production solution, and even as an early version, it offers a “wow factor” in the same way Midjourney did in 2022.
A key differentiator is the editing tools. Pika Labs seems to be in a features arms race with Runway, but the newcomer is offering far more control. Pika 1.0 includes pan, tilt, and zoom in its customized camera movements features. It also offers in-painting and retries and the ability to choose the aspect ratio and framerate. Both solutions will animate uploaded still images, but Pika enables you to request specific animation.
Pika Labs offers control in a way that no text-to-video providers have in the past. It is similar to what we are seeing now in the more mature text-to-image category. Check out the recent Anime, Halloween, and Invasion videos below for some examples.
Text-to-Video on the Rise
AI-generated videos have thus far had a supply problem. I am not referring to the talking-head virtual human solutions, sometimes called text-to-video. There are plenty of options in that genre for presentation and training. The prompt-to-video creation for what you might call short films has been severely limited. Runway took an early lead in the space, and Stability AI just launched a new solution. Other than that, we’ve mostly seen demos that are not production-ready.
Pika Labs may be the application that brings text-to-video to a new level of creativity and higher consumer awareness. Because videos have motion and multiple frames, there is a higher chance of error. Two seconds of flawless video followed by a second of something weird often leads to scrapping the entire video or severely trimming it. If these were images, you just generate a new one and move on. Video is more challenging. It must maintain quality over time and handle motion in a natural way.
Pika Labs may have struck the right combination of high-quality video output with sufficient control for creators to dig into their projects. And now, the company has sufficient funding to scale quickly and add customers. Get ready for 2024.
