Pika Closes $580 Million Series B Financing, Doubles Valuation to $3.4 Billion

Pika

Founded by two Chinese Stanford PhDs, StarAI Video GenerationfirmsPikaIn recently completed a new round of financing. On June 5, local time, Pika announced on its official website that it has recently completed a total of $80 million (about 580 million yuan) in Series B financing, led by Spark Capital, with participation from Greycroft, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Jared Leto.

In a blog post, Pika founders Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng said it's been a year since they dropped out of Stanford to build Pika, and in that time the company has released its 1.0 model and expanded its team from three to 13 people. As for what the funding will be used for, the team said the round will accelerate Pika's process of building the best possible video model, as well as help hire great talent.

Founded in April 2023, Pika's founders, Guo Wenjing and Meng Chenlin, are both PhD students at Stanford University's AI Lab, focusing on AI research in the directions of NLP and computer vision respectively, and also have academic experience in generative AI. Last November, Pika released its first AI video generation product, Pika 1.0, which is now available for free. This application can generate and edit 3D animation, anime, cartoon and movie videos of various styles, and at the same time, it can expand the capacity of pictures and so on according to the demand, and once launched, it quickly became popular on major social media.

After this round, Pika will be valued at over $470 million (roughly Rs. 3.4 billion), doubling from the previous round.

Five rounds of financing completed to date

Founded more than a year ago, Pika has completed five rounds of financing, totaling $135 million, with investors including Adam D'Angelo, founder of Quora; Nat Friedman, former CEO of Github; Daniel Gross, Silicon Valley investor; and Elad Gil, co-founder of Color, Giphy co-founder Alex Chung and others.

Challenges and opportunities

Producing high-quality AI videos is never easy. It requires enormous computing power and complex algorithms, making it costly and technically challenging. The challenge for all these companies is to perfect the technically demanding and costly process of creating AI videos while improving the user experience and accessibility of the tools.

Public information shows that Pika currently has millions of users and generates millions of videos per week. Meanwhile, Pika has leased hundreds of quantum GPU (Graphics Processor) chips for model training and inference calculations.

competitive pressure

However, as a startup in the field of AI video generation, Pika is facing a lot of competition, including OpenAI, Google and other big players and Runway and other AI video generation startups have corresponding products. Earlier this year, OpenAI had launched Sora to raise concern, Sora support to generate 60s video, and the details are realistic, more high-definition; another player Runway has previously raised more than 250 million dollars from Google, NVIDIA and other investors, valued at 1.5 billion dollars.

summarize

The funding and attention Pika has received underscores the potential of AI video generation and the need for easier-to-use tools. Despite the competition, Pika Labs remains confident in its ability to build the best video foundation models and deliver a superior product to video creators.

While the potential applications of AI-generated video content are vast, it is important to question the potential misuse of this technology, such as the dissemination of disinformation and propaganda.Companies such as OpenAI and Google have been overly cautious, limiting access to their technology. It is crucial for companies like Pika Labs to also be more transparent about how they prioritize responsible development and safe use of their technology.