ENTER THE PIKA-VERSE

Can this AI video startup sidestep Big Tech competition by focusing on social media?

- NICOLE LAPORTE

MATAN COHEN-GRUMI REMEMBERS THE FIRST TIME he experienced “the squish.”

The founding creative director of the generative AI video platform Pika was playing around with a new suite of effects the company had just come up with. One tool took an image and made it look like two sets of fingers were literally squishing the subject—be it a cat, a cup, or a person’s head—in a delightfully (and terrifyingly) realistic way, complete with scrunching sound effects.

“There was something very surprising about it,” says Cohen-Grumi, a former TV and commercial director who first discovered the magic of generative AI in 2023, when he used Midjourney to make a short film for his (now defunct) rock band. “I remember saying to everyone, ‘I’ve been playing with AI for so long. I've never laughed so hard. I hope this will translate.’”

It did. When the now 18-month-old Pika released its “Pikaffects” tools in October 2024, users could squish, inflate, and “cake-ify” images and videos—the internet was flooded with metamorphosing bicycles, pets, and body parts. Tattoo artist Christopher Miranda’s video of what appeared to be a knife cutting into a man’s tattooed head, revealing a yellow layer cake inside, received 1.9 million views on Instagram. Even brands got in on the fun: Fashion house Balenciaga posted a video squishing one of its 6XL sneakers, racking up nearly 20,000 likes on Instagram. Pika says the virality of the new tools translated into an 800% increase in users.

The success of Pikaffects was an “aha” moment for the company. Cofounded in April 2023 by Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, who dropped out of Stanford’s artificial intelligence PhD program to start Pika, the company was originally focused on being a tool for professional-quality video. But now, it saw an opportunity to become the go-to AI platform for the TikTok crowd, focused on social media-friendly templates for easily shareable short videos.