From the Editor's Desk

How This 26-Year-Old First-Time Founder Raised $55 Million for Her AI Startup

In November 2023, generative AI-powered video startup Pika announced that it had raised $55 million from a combination of angel investors and VC firms including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Factorial Capital. The raise positions Pika as a potential competitor to OpenAI's in-development video generation model, Sora. Pika was launched in 2023 by 26-year-old CEO Demi Guo, who, along with her friend and co-founder Chenlin Meng, dropped out of Stanford University's artificial intelligence PhD program to start the company.

One of the keys to Pika's fundraising success is a professional network Guo has been cultivating since middle school. Mentors that Guo met through computer science competitions like the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), in which she won a silver medal in 2015, helped secure Pika's first meetings with investors.


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