Pika

Pika was founded in 2023 by Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng. It initially sought to make video creation more accessible through AI generation and editing, establishing the basis for a broader creative platform.⁠[1]

Lightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture Partners backs companies from seed through late-stage financing. Its website distinguishes Lightspeed Management Company (LSVP) from Lightspeed India Partners (LSIP): the two are separately operated investment advisers, with the U.S., European, and Israeli offices belonging to LSVP and the India and Southeast Asia offices belonging to LSIP.Open the full entry announced a $35 million Series A, joined by existing investors including Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and Elad Gil. Pika 1.0 launched alongside the financing, offering text- and image-based video creation, inpainting, outpainting and camera-motion controls.⁠[2]

Pika announced completion of an $80 million Series B led by Spark CapitalSpark CapitalSpark Capital is a U.S. venture capital firm founded in Boston in 2005, with offices in San Francisco, New York and Boston. Its early-stage and growth funds back technology businesses across fintech, enterprise software, AI and consumer products. Investments have included Twitter, Tumblr, Oculus, Plaid and Anthropic.Open the full entry. Its announcement also named supporters including Greycroft, Lightspeed, Neo and Makers Fund. The round amount is separate from earlier financing and does not represent the company’s valuation.⁠[3]

The company introduced Pika 2.0 with Scene Ingredients. Users could upload images of people, places and objects as material for generated scenes, giving them more control over composition and consistency.⁠[4]

Pika Soundtrack generates an audio track from video and optional text direction, connecting visible action and timing to Foley, ambience, music and voices. Its technical report describes latent diffusion and cautions that speed comparisons used different execution environments rather than identical hardware.⁠[5]

Pika released H3 Flex, post-trained on MiniMax H3 for iterative video creation. It reported roughly seven seconds of transformer computation for a 15-second 768p clip, excluding end-to-end service latency. API access opened with the announcement, which planned creation-product availability for November 2.⁠[6]

Pika organizes creation into video, image and audio apps. Users can generate new material or extend, recolor, replace and add sound to existing assets. Apps use Pika’s own models and third-party models, with inputs and output settings varying by model.⁠[7]

Pika 2.5 supports five-second text-generated clips, five- or ten-second photo animation, and transitions between two to five ordered images. Outputs generally offer 720p or 1080p, with five-keyframe sequences limited to 720p. The model produces silent video, requiring sound to be added separately.⁠[8]

The technical report describes supervised fine-tuning, distribution-matching distillation, and reward and preference learning, reducing denoising from 50 steps to six. It identifies physics, multi-scene consistency and complex reference control as areas for improvement; gains on selected evaluations do not establish superiority on every creative task.⁠[9]

The repository distinguishes local adapters, which generate native 480p or 768p video with mixed stereo audio and up to 12 references, from hosted higher-resolution, audio-stem and prompt-enhancement services. Adapters use the MiniMax H3 Community License; inference code uses Apache 2.0.⁠[10]

Pika’s ChatGPT plugin brings video, image and audio tools into a conversational interface, with tool selection, visual presets and access to the Pika library. Timeline editing supports timing changes, clip regeneration, transitions, effects and music, with creations connected to the user’s Pika library.⁠[11]

API Club provides multiple providers’ generative-media models through one interface. Its page lists a $10 monthly membership plus usage-based model charges, with a $10 first-month credit for new members. Membership therefore does not include unlimited free generations; model prices are listed separately.⁠[12]

The creative product offers Free, Starter, Creator, Fancy and enterprise plans, using credits to account for generation. Its current pricing page distinguishes monthly allowances, concurrency and priority access; the free plan excludes a commercial licence. Use remains subject to the chosen plan and service terms.⁠[13]