Pika Labs

Pika Labs (legally incorporated as Mellis, Inc. and doing business as Pika) is an American generative AI company that builds consumer software for creating short AI videos from text, images, or clips. Founded in April 2023 by Stanford computer-science PhD students Demi Guo (CEO) and Chenlin Meng (CTO), Pika raised roughly $135 million by mid-2024 at a reported $470 million valuation and reported 16.4 million users across its apps by October 2025.^{[1][5][6][26]}

Pika built one of the first consumer-facing text-to-video generators to achieve mainstream attention and has been frequently grouped with Runway and OpenAI's Sora as a pioneer of the AI video category.^[1][2][3] The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and remains privately held. Between April 2023 and June 2024 it raised across pre-seed, seed, Series A, and Series B rounds, with lead investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Spark Capital and angels including Andrej Karpathy, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Adam D'Angelo, and the actor Jared Leto.^[4][5][6]

This article covers Pika Labs as a company: its founders, history, funding, and team. For technical details about the company's generative video models and product features, see pika and Pika 2.5.

Key facts

Scroll sideways for more →

Who founded Pika?

Pika Labs was founded in April 2023 by Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, classmates in Stanford University's AI Lab who both took leave from their PhD programs to start the company.^[1][2][7]

Demi Guo (co-founder and CEO)

Demi Guo was born in Hangzhou, China, and moved to the United States for higher education. She earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in computer science from Harvard University, where she was active in entrepreneurship and engineering student groups. She subsequently enrolled in Stanford's computer science PhD program, where she was co-advised by professors Ron Fedkiw and Christopher Manning, working at the intersection of natural language processing and computer graphics.^[7][8]

Prior to founding Pika, Guo held research and engineering internships at Google Brain, Microsoft Research, Quora, and Hudson River Trading, and worked as a research engineer at Facebook AI Research (now Meta AI). She was a silver medalist at the 2015 International Olympiad in Informatics and a two-time winner of the USA Computing Olympiad Open division.^[7][8] Guo was 25 at the time of Pika's founding and 27 when Fortune profiled her in October 2025, and is reported to be one of the youngest founders of a venture-backed generative-AI company to reach a nine-figure valuation.^[9][26]

Chenlin Meng (co-founder and CTO)

Chenlin Meng studied mathematics and computer science at Stanford as an undergraduate and continued there for a PhD, advised by Stefano Ermon. Her doctoral research focused on generative models and diffusion-based image and video synthesis. She is a co-author of Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM), a widely used sampling method for diffusion models that has been cited thousands of times and is integral to systems including DALL-E 2, Imagen, and Stable Diffusion.^[10][11][7]

Before co-founding Pika, Meng interned at Google AI and published on generative AI at venues including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, and CVPR. She received the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship and the Cadence Women in Technology Scholarship.^[11][7]

What is the origin story of Pika?

Guo and Meng have said in interviews that the immediate impetus for the company was their own frustration with existing video tools when trying to produce a short film for a Stanford class project: they found the available consumer software too cumbersome and the research-grade systems too inaccessible. They began experimenting with text-to-video models in mid-2022 and 2023 and posted early demos to a Discord server, which quickly attracted hundreds of thousands of users and angel-investor interest.^[2][3]

According to multiple interviews, the founders chose the name "Pika" after the small, photogenic mountain mammal of the same name, with the founders citing its visual recognizability and the brevity of the syllables as appealing branding qualities. The company was incorporated in California as Mellis, Inc. but has consistently done business under the Pika and Pika Labs names.^[24][4]

Guo and Meng formally took leaves of absence from their Stanford PhD programs to focus on the company; both have stated publicly that they consider their academic enrollment paused rather than abandoned, although neither had returned to the program as of the most recent reporting.^[7][9]

How much funding has Pika raised?

Pika Labs raised capital unusually quickly for an AI video startup, completing four announced rounds within its first roughly fourteen months of operation, reaching approximately $135 million in total funding at a reported $470 million post-money valuation.^[6][14]

Pre-seed and seed (April-mid-2023)

In the six months between the company's founding and its public launch in November 2023, Pika Labs raised approximately $20 million across pre-seed and seed rounds. Both rounds were led by the AI-focused angel investors Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO) and Daniel Gross, investing through their joint fund.^[1][4][12]

Other early-round participants included Andrej Karpathy (former Tesla and OpenAI researcher), Elad Gil, Adam D'Angelo (CEO of Quora and a board member of OpenAI), Clem Delangue (CEO of Hugging Face), Aravind Srinivas (CEO of Perplexity), Vipul Ved Prakash (CEO of Together), Mati Staniszewski (CEO of ElevenLabs), Keith Peiris (CEO of Tome), Craig Kallman (CEO of Atlantic Records), and Alex Chung (co-founder of Giphy), as well as the firms Homebrew, Conviction Capital, SV Angel, and Ben's Bites.^[1][4][12]

Series A: $35 million (November 2023)

On 28 November 2023, Pika announced a $35 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing total capital raised to approximately $55 million.^{[1][2][4][12]} The Series A was timed with the public release of Pika 1.0, the company's first widely available web product. Lightspeed partners Lisa Han and Guru Chahal led the firm's investment.^[13]

Series B: $80 million (June 2024)

On 4 June 2024, Pika announced an $80 million Series B led by Spark Capital, with participation from Lightspeed, Greycroft, and the actor Jared Leto. Bloomberg reported a post-money valuation of approximately $470 million.^[5][6][14] Total funding reached approximately $135 million.^[6]

At the time of the Series B, multiple sources reported Pika had only around 13 full-time employees, including researchers who had previously worked at Google, Meta, and Uber, an unusually small headcount relative to the size of the round and the company's valuation.^[6][14]

Later activity

As of the publication date of this article, Pika Labs has not publicly announced a Series C funding round. Industry sources have estimated the company's value at higher figures in subsequent secondary-market activity, but no primary-market round has been disclosed.^[15]

What products does Pika make?

A full description of Pika's models and product features is maintained at pika. The timeline of major releases attributable to Pika Labs is:

Scroll sideways for more →

When Pika announced version 2.2 on 27 February 2025, the company described it on its official account: "Pika 2.2 is HERE, with 10s generations, 1080p resolution, and Pikaframes, key frame transitions anywhere from 1-10s."^[27] The company also operates standalone tools and mobile apps, including a Pikaffects iOS app and integrations with third-party software such as Adobe Firefly Boards.^[20]

What are Pikaffects?

"Pikaffects" are pre-set visual effects, introduced with Pika 1.5 in October 2024, that apply stylized physics-style transformations to any object in a frame. Examples include "Squish It," which turns the subject of a video or photo into a squishy toy manipulated by a pair of AI-generated hands, "Cake-ify It," which slices a subject open to reveal cake interior, and earlier effects such as "melt," "explode," and "inflate."^[17][26] Pika released a dedicated Pikaffects mobile app, and Fortune reported in October 2025 that the virality of these effects helped drive an 800 percent increase in users.^[26][20]

Team and notable backers

Pika Labs has historically operated with a small team. Reporting around the Series B in mid-2024 placed full-time headcount at approximately 13 people, including engineers and researchers with prior experience at Google, Meta, and Uber.^[6][14] Third-party data aggregators reported the company had grown to roughly 48 employees by the end of 2024,^[21] and over 100 employees by early 2026, though Pika Labs has not publicly confirmed precise figures.

In addition to its institutional lead investors, Lightspeed Venture Partners (Series A) and Spark Capital (Series B), Pika's cap table notably includes a number of prominent AI researchers and operators as angels.

• Researchers and AI operators: Andrej Karpathy (former director of AI at Tesla, founding member of OpenAI); Aravind Srinivas (CEO of Perplexity); Clem Delangue (CEO of Hugging Face); Vipul Ved Prakash (CEO of Together AI); Mati Staniszewski (CEO of ElevenLabs); Keith Peiris (CEO of Tome).^[1][4][12]
• AI-focused investors: Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO); Daniel Gross (former Y Combinator partner); Elad Gil; Adam D'Angelo (CEO of Quora; OpenAI board member).^[1][4][12]
• Other backers: the actor Jared Leto, Atlantic Records CEO Craig Kallman, and Giphy co-founder Alex Chung; venture firms Homebrew, Conviction Capital, SV Angel, and Ben's Bites.^{[1][4][6][12]}

The composition of Pika's cap table, heavy on practitioners in adjacent generative-AI fields rather than purely on traditional financial investors, has been highlighted by industry observers as a distinctive feature of the company's early-stage capital raising, providing both technical guidance and ecosystem distribution channels.^[9][4]

Leadership

Demi Guo serves as chief executive officer and Chenlin Meng as chief technology officer. The pair have not publicly disclosed additional named executive roles such as CFO or COO. Operationally, Guo has spoken about her involvement in fundraising, product, hiring, and external partnerships, while Meng leads research and engineering, including the design and training of successive versions of the Pika video model.^[9][7]

How does Pika compare to Runway and Sora?

Pika Labs occupies a distinctive position in the AI-video market, generally identified as one of the earliest consumer-oriented entrants. Its principal competitors include Runway (Gen-3, Gen-4), OpenAI's Sora, Google DeepMind's Veo line, Kling (Kuaishou), and Luma AI's Dream Machine.^[22][23]

Whereas Runway has positioned itself as an editor-centric tool for professional creators and Sora and Veo as quality-leading general-purpose models, Pika has emphasized short-form, social, and prosumer use cases, with a focus on accessible web-based prompting, special effects ("Pikaffects"), and consumer mobile apps.^[22][23] Pika 2.5 and earlier versions have been widely reviewed as competitive on short, stylized content but generally behind Sora-class systems on long-duration realism.^[19][23]

Industry analysts have described the post-Sora generative-video landscape as bifurcated between very large, generalist frontier-lab models and smaller, more product-focused start-ups; Pika is typically placed in the latter group together with Runway, Luma, and several Chinese entrants such as Kling and Hailuo. Pika's distinguishing competitive strategy as of 2024-2026 has been a heavy emphasis on stylized social-video features (the "Pikaffects" line and templated transformations) and on a hosted web product with a generous free tier and consumer-priced paid plans.^[9][22]

Pika has also taken a notably different go-to-market path from Runway, which evolved from a creative-software company already serving professional video editors. Pika launched directly to consumers on Discord and the web, and many of its users came from existing AI-art communities. The company has subsequently added more traditional creator-economy and professional-tooling features (such as the Studio editor in Pika 2.5) and entered into ecosystem partnerships including integration with Adobe Firefly Boards.^[20][19]

Reception and impact

Pika's November 2023 launch coincided with, and was an early example of, the rapid 2023-2024 emergence of consumer text-to-video AI as a category. Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng have been profiled in mainstream business publications including Bloomberg, Inc., TechCrunch, Forbes, Fortune, and the South China Morning Post, and have featured on lists of notable women in AI.^{[6][9][1][7][26]}

The company is occasionally cited as evidence of the lean nature of post-foundation-model startups: a very small team building on top of (or alongside) external research advances can, with concentrated capital, reach significant valuations and large user bases within a year of incorporation.^[6][14] Critics have noted that this dynamic also makes such companies vulnerable to capability shifts at the frontier laboratories, as illustrated by industry reactions to OpenAI's announcement of Sora in February 2024.^[22]

Pika has also drawn attention because of its founders' demographic profile. Both Guo and Meng are women in their twenties at the time of founding, in a field where founder demographics skew heavily male and older. Multiple "women in AI" profiles and lists, including an early 100 Women in AI feature on Meng and several profiles of Guo in Chinese-language business media, have highlighted the pair as notable examples of young female-led AI start-ups.^[11][7][25]

The release of Pika 1.0 in late 2023 attracted considerable mainstream press coverage in part because the company's product demonstrations included stylized "anime," "3D animation," and "cinematic" clips that captured public imagination as AI video moved from research curiosities to user-facing tools. Coverage at the time often paired Pika with Runway and the then-newly announced Stability AI Stable Video Diffusion model.^[16][3]

What is Pika's strategy for 2025 and 2026?

Through 2025 and into 2026, Pika doubled down on social, consumer-first AI video rather than competing head-on as a foundation-model laboratory. Fortune reported in October 2025 that Pika had reached 16.4 million users across its creative apps and had launched a TikTok-like AI video app, followed by a feature called Predictive Video that lets a user upload a selfie and give a simple prompt such as "make me a rock star" or "I'm giving a TED Talk," after which the tool infers intent and generates a complete video with a script, music, dance moves, background, lighting, camera angles, and visual effects.^[26] In the same profile, Guo framed the company's bet on casual creators: "Most nonprofessionals will never try to create a film using generative AI, but lots of people like to make short videos," adding that for users "it's really about self-expression."^[26] The company also reported that one Pika video exceeded 19 million views on TikTok, illustrating the platform's focus on viral, scroll-stopping short-form content.^[26]

As of the company's most recent product release, Pika 2.5, the company has continued to position itself as a consumer- and creator-focused player rather than a foundation-model laboratory, with public statements from Guo and Meng emphasizing product polish, latency, and accessibility over headline benchmark numbers.^[19][9]

References

1. Wiggers, K. "Pika, which is building AI tools to generate and edit videos, raises $55M." *TechCrunch*, 28 November 2023. https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/28/pika-labs-which-is-building-ai-tools-to-generate-and-edit-videos-raises-55m/ ↩
2. Franzen, C. "Pika Labs raises $55M, launches new AI video platform to take on Runway." *VentureBeat*, 28 November 2023. https://venturebeat.com/ai/pika-labs-raises-55m-launches-new-ai-video-platform-to-take-on-runway/ ↩
3. "Generative Video Startup Pika Labs Launches Version 1.0, Raises $55 Million in Funding." *PetaPixel*, 28 November 2023. https://petapixel.com/2023/11/28/generative-video-startup-pika-labs-launches-version-1-0-raises-55-million-in-funding/ ↩
4. "AI Company Pika Raises $55M to Redesign Video Making and Editing." *Business Wire*, 27 November 2023. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231127388431/en/AI-Company-Pika-Raises-$55M-to-Redesign-Video-Making-and-Editing ↩
5. Bass, D. "Spark Capital, Jared Leto Back AI Video Startup Pika." *Bloomberg*, 5 June 2024. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-05/spark-capital-jared-leto-back-ai-video-startup-pika ↩
6. "Pika Labs Secures $80M in Series B Funding." *Maginative*, June 2024. https://www.maginative.com/article/pika-labs-secures-80m-in-series-b-funding/ ↩
7. "Pika Labs Founders." pikalabs.org. https://pikalabs.org/pika-labs-founders/ ↩
8. "Meet Demi Guo, Harvard graduate behind $470M AI video startup Pika." *VnExpress International*. https://e.vnexpress.net/news/tech/personalities/meet-demi-guo-harvard-graduate-behind-470m-ai-video-startup-pika-4954559.html ↩
9. "Pika valuation, funding & news." *Sacra*. https://sacra.com/c/pika/ ↩
10. Song, J.; Meng, C.; Ermon, S. "Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models." ICLR 2021. https://github.com/ermongroup/ddim ↩
11. "Chenlin Meng." *100 Women in AI*. https://www.100womeninai.com/chenlin-meng ↩
12. "Pika Raises $35M in Series A Funding." *FinSMEs*, 28 November 2023. https://www.finsmes.com/2023/11/pika-raises-35m-in-series-a-funding.html ↩
13. "Pika." Lightspeed Venture Partners portfolio page. https://lsvp.com/company/pika/ ↩
14. "Pika Labs Secures $80 Million in Funding, Elevates Valuation to $470 Million." *CTOL Digital Solutions*, June 2024. https://www.ctol.digital/news/pika-labs-raises-80m-in-funding-round/ ↩
15. "Pika Labs: Funding Rounds & List of Investors." *Tracxn*, 2026. https://tracxn.com/d/companies/pikalabs/__2zhxvsK8_xk3FaRpKNAgYL0SN_8TY86kzTFfILNVtNE/funding-and-investors ↩
16. "Pika raises $80M, so anyone can make video on command." Pika company blog. https://pika.art/blog/announcement ↩
17. "Pika 2.5 Review." *Pika AIS*. https://pikaais.com/pika-2.5/ ↩
18. "Pika Labs releases AI video generator 2.0 with new features." *The Decoder*, December 2024. https://the-decoder.com/pika-labs-releases-ai-video-generator-2-0-with-new-features/ ↩
19. "Pika Labs Releases Pika 2.5: Next-Gen AI Video Engine." pikartai.com. https://pikartai.com/pika-2-5/ ↩
20. "Pikaffects by Pika, App Store." Apple Inc. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pikaffects-by-pika/id6680155400 ↩
21. "How Pika hit $7.6M revenue with a 48 person team in 2024." *GetLatka*. https://getlatka.com/companies/pika ↩
22. "AI Video Market After Sora: Runway, Kling, and Veo." *Digital Applied*, 2026. https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/ai-video-market-after-sora-runway-kling-veo-2026 ↩
23. "Best AI Video Generators in 2025: Sora 2 vs Runway vs Pika Labs Complete Review." *Lovart AI*. https://www.lovart.ai/blog/video-generators-review ↩
24. "Pika (Mellis, Inc.), Palo Alto, California, USA." *Portal of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence*. https://pr.ai/threads/pika-mellis-inc-palo-alto-california-usa.25224/ ↩
25. "Demi Guo & Chenlin Meng: Women in AI Driving Generative Video Innovation at Pika Labs." Ayesha Khanna. https://www.ayeshakhanna.com/women-in-ai-feature/demi-g-and-chenlin-meng ↩
26. "Pika, a new TikTok-like AI app, makes playful, creative short videos from just a few words." *Fortune*, 16 October 2025. https://fortune.com/2025/10/16/this-26-year-olds-tiktok-like-ai-app-makes-playful-creative-short-videos-from-just-a-few-words-its-built-for-gen-z/ ↩
27. Pika (@pika_labs). "Pika 2.2 is HERE, with 10s generations, 1080p resolution, and Pikaframes, key frame transitions anywhere from 1-10s." X (Twitter), 27 February 2025. https://x.com/pika_labs/status/1895156950431867318 ↩