580 million yuan! The post-95 high-value "genius girl" was re-financed, and the valuation of the company exceeded 3 billion yuan

National Business Daily

2024-06-09 17:22Published on the official account of Sichuan Daily Economic News

Pika, which once caused a sensation in A-shares, has new news after being silent for half a year.

Recently, Pika Labs, an AI video generation startup founded by Guo Wenjing, a post-95 "genius girl", announced on its official website that the company has recently completed a Series B financing of 80 million US dollars (about 580 million yuan). The round was led by Spark Capital, with participation from Greycroft, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Jared Leto.

After this round of financing, Pika's total financing has reached US$135 million, and its valuation will exceed US$470 million (about 3.4 billion yuan). 

It has been sought after by most of Silicon Valley

It raised 400 million yuan in half a year after its establishment

On November 29 last year, Pika announced on its official website at the time that it was excited to launch Pika 1.0, a major product upgrade that includes a new AI model capable of generating and editing videos in different styles such as 3D animations, anime, cartoons, and movies, as well as a new web experience that makes it easier to use. It is known as a zero-threshold "video generation artifact" by the outside world.

At that time, the "spokesperson" for this company was Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX. On Pika's official promotional video, you only need to type "Musk in a spacesuit, 3D animation", an animated version of Musk wearing a spacesuit and preparing to ride a rocket to space can be generated, and the shape, action, background and other elements are very realistic, which can be comparable to 3D animation images made at a large cost. 

"This marks the latest advancement in AI-driven video generation and allows Pika to compete directly with Tier 1 rivals such as Runway and Stability AI." After the release of Pika 1.0, there were excited industry insiders who commented on it.

Founded by Stanford's "genius beautiful girl", the start-up company with only 4 founding team members quickly attracted the attention of most of Silicon Valley, raising 55 million US dollars (about 400 million yuan) and reaching a valuation of 200 million US dollars. Pre-seed and seed rounds led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Pika还表示,公司的投资者还包括Elad Gil、Adam D'Angelo(Quora 创始人兼首席执行官)、Zach(Ramp联合创始人)、Andrej Karpathy、Clem Delange(Hugging Face联合创始人兼首席执行官兼Factorial Capital合伙人)等,,以及Homebrew、Conviction Partners、SV Angel和Ben's Bites等风险投资公司,以及许多其他受人尊敬的行业领导者和AI专家。

Pika believes that video is at the heart of entertainment, but the process of producing high-quality video is still complex and resource-intensive. When Pika was founded, the company wanted to push the boundaries of technology and design a futuristic video production interface that would be easily accessible to everyone. Since then, the company has proudly grown the Pika community to half a million users who generate millions of videos per week.

After encountering the impact of Sora, it was silent for half a year

It claims to be able to train video models at a low cost

However, just two months after Pika's meteoric popularity, OpenAI released the Wensheng video model Sora, which allows users to generate high-definition, coherent, and highly consistent videos with Sora using natural language prompts, while Pika was only able to achieve video coherence in a few seconds at the time.

After the release of Sora, many people believed that OpenAI easily "beats" AI video startups such as Runway and Pika, and expressed concern about the fate of entrepreneurs. Guo Wenjing said in response to media concerns, "We think this is very exciting news, and we are already preparing to directly rush and will directly benchmark against Sora." ”

It is undeniable that the appearance of Sora has made Pika's situation a little "awkward". In the past six months, the industry and the media have paid some attention to and discussed Pika, which has been quite silent.

In the past six months, Pika has made a lot of technical efforts and launched a series of new features. For example, style options have been added, providing users with 7 different video style choices such as anime, gloomy, 3D, watercolor, nature, clay animation, black and white, etc.; Add video generation sound effect function, which can seamlessly add sound effects to the generated video; Partnered with ElevenLabs to launch the Lip sync feature, which enables "audio generation + video lip-syncing" and more. However, Pika is still only capable of producing 4-second HD coherent video, and doesn't have a clear lead over its competitors.

Meanwhile, Similarweb data shows that Pika had 2 million website visits in April, up just 400,000 from when it first launched in November and down 64% from its peak. Pika, which has a mediocre performance in terms of technology improvement and user growth, is still able to gain the favor of capital, which is a bit surprising to many people.

At the end of last year, Guo Wenjing said in an interview with the media that with the increase in users, the team may expand to 20 people in 2024. With the completion of the new round of financing, it was found that the Pika team now has 13 people, the resumes of engineering and scientific research personnel are very impressive, and the advisory team behind it is also very luxurious.

After this round of financing, Pika announced that it has built its own AI video generation base model and will not rely on the technology of other companies. There is widespread concern that training video models will require huge amounts of computing power and funds, but Guo Wenjing also responded that Pika does not need to consume a lot of money and can be trained at a lower cost. She said that Pika is similar to Mistral AI, a large French AI model, and can train better models with less money.

Although this round of financing is somewhat "unexpected", with the new round of funding and ammunition in place and the expansion of the scientific research and engineering team, whether Pika can bring "unexpected" surprises in AI video technology and commercial applications in the future determines whether it can continue to gain the favor of capital.

Harvard interviewer calls her "near-perfect"

It has caused a sensation in A-shares

It is reported that Guo Wenjing is the co-founder and CEO of Pika. Prior to founding Pika, Wenjing Guo received his Ph.D. in AI from Stanford University. It is worth noting that she is also the founder of the listed company Xinyada (600571. SH) is the daughter of Guo Huaqiang, the actual controller, and is currently an American citizen.

According to public information, Guo Wenjing received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Harvard University, while studying for a master's degree in computer science, and transferred to Stanford University to study for a doctorate, conducting research in the intersection of graphics and neuro-linguistic programming.

As early as more than eight years ago, Guo Wenjing became popular because of his "good-looking scholars". Eight years ago, Guo Wenjing, a 2016 graduate of Hangzhou No. 2 High School, received an admission letter to Harvard University, and she was also the first student from Hangzhou No. 2 High School to be admitted to Harvard University at the undergraduate level.

According to the Qianjiang Evening News, Guo Wenjing studied at Hangzhou No. 2 Middle School (Hangzhou No. 2 Middle School). In his first year of high school, he won the first prize of the National Youth Informatics Olympiad League (Zhejiang Province), and was invited by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to participate in the competition, and won the second place in the North American Programming Invitational Competition, surpassing most of the college teams from Harvard, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon. In 2014 and 2015, he participated in the National Informatics Olympiad in the United States for two consecutive years and won the championship.

In the eyes of his classmates, Guo Wenjing is more "wave" than other girls, and he is often busy with the activities of the debate club outside. "She has a lot of things to do every day, unlike other girls, who brush up on questions in the reading room during breaks."

In the view of Ye Cuiwei, who was the principal of Hangzhou No. 2 Middle School at the time, Guo Wenjing knew what he wanted and what he had to face. Especially her maverick personality. "When I was 15 years old, I was able to fly to the United States alone to teach American children the Olympiad and get a $2,000 payment."

According to the Harvard undergraduate alumni interviewer, "I have been interviewing in China for 6 years, and she is one of the best students. Her computer skills are also among the top among female programmers of the same age in the United States. She scored 5 perfect marks in the American college preparatory exam, is very fluent in English, and has a high appearance, which is almost perfect. ”

Xinyada, which is listed on the A-share market, has also attracted attention for its "daughter concept stock", causing a sensation.

At the end of November last year, Xinyada's stock price doubled once after a continuous daily limit. In the related stock forum, some investors were puzzled by the rise of Xinyada, and another investor succinctly replied "My daughter is amazing".

At that time, the reporter of "Daily Economic News" called the office of the secretary of the board of directors of Xinyada, and asked whether Guo Wenjing, the founder of Pika, was the daughter of Guo Huaqiang, and the staff replied: "Yes, yes, but it has no connection with our company's main body and no business dealings." She (Guo Wenjing) also does not hold any position in our company. Regarding whether the listed company will contribute to the establishment of Pika, it said: "Not for the time being, and I don't know if there will be any after that." ”

According to the data, Guo Huaqiang was born in 1956 and graduated from China Central Radio and Television University in 1986 with a major in finance and an MBA from Zhejiang University. Guo Huaqiang used to be the head of the software section of the Science and Technology Department of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of Zhejiang Province, and the vice chairman and president of Hangzhou Xinli Electronics Co., Ltd. In 1996, he founded Xinyada and successively served as executive director and chairman. Now he has stepped down as chairman, but he is still the actual controller of the company.

It is reported that Xinyada's main business is a financial institution based on the banking industry, providing end-to-end professional solutions and products, and the main products are software products, hardware sales, and environmental protection products.

According to Xinyada's 2022 annual report, the company is committed to building an AI foundation. According to the annual report, by focusing on the deep integration of new technologies and financial business, the company has helped banks and other financial customers accelerate their digital transformation and help China's financial industry quickly realize digital intelligence with its multi-level full-stack product and service capabilities of "digital base + technology base + AI base + application platform + co-creation and development + subscription service + joint operation".

Among them, the AI base is composed of two modules: capability output and capability building, and has achieved R&D breakthroughs in OCR (optical character recognition), NPL, data modeling, and knowledge graph around the company's main product lines.

Editor|Duan Lian, Yi Qijiang, Gai Yuanyuan

Proofreading|Wang Yuelong

The daily economic news is synthesized from Securities Times, Meijing.com, Beijing Youth Daily, Qianjiang Evening News, venture capital exchange, public information, etc

National Business Daily

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