Pika Labs is bringing the heat to AI videos.

Pika Labs, the AI video startup, has raised $35 million for its series A from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Elad Gill, Andrej Karpathy and others including Ben’s Bites. It’s bringing the heat in text-to-video space with studio-quality video production. Pika 1.0 is now open to everyone.

What’s going on here?

Pika Labs raises $55M to turn your ideas into videos for everyday consumers.

What does this mean?

Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng founded Pika Labs after participating in Runway’s AI film festival last year and are now ready to give them tough competition. Pika Labs has already over 500,000 users creating viral videos via Discord and now it’s launching the web app.

You can sign up for Pika 1.0, a major upgrade from their early product. It has a new AI model that can generate and edit videos in diverse styles such as 3D animation, anime or cinematic. It slays at the usual text-to-video, but to top it off works with images and videos as inputs as well. You can resize video canvas, selectively edit parts in a video and more.

The four-person startup has raised $55 million across three funding rounds within months. The first two were led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and the latest—a $35 million Series A from Lightspeed Venture Partners. Forbes wrote a profile on the company and founders covering their story and next steps.

Why should I care?

Karpathy (also an investor) tweeted that this is similar to how image model quality increased across the X and Y axes, going from small 32×32 patches to high-resolution, realistic images. This time it’s along the time axis, instead of a single frame, you are getting seconds of videos.

For the normal user, I think of it as how Canva brought design to everyone. Imagine creating beautiful (or rare) videos for your everyday use.