Pika released Pika 1.0 and disclosed $55 million in funding alongside it. What had been a Discord bot was rebuilt as a web service: as well as producing video in styles from 3D animation to anime to live action, it could extend a clip, widen the aspect ratio, and swap out what was in the frame. The money was largely a Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with individuals including Quora's founder and GitHub's former CEO taking part. The company had been started that year by two people who had been PhD students at Stanford. At the announcement it put its community at 500,000 people generating millions of videos a week. Video generation at the time was still largely something you tried through a bot on Discord; products that stood on their own on the web were few.