image-to-video
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Mewtant Found a Business in the Margins of the Picture
Its product, PixAI, began with a simple bargain: describe an anime character and see one appear. The more interesting business emerged after the image was made.
LemonSlice
LemonSlice is a San Francisco AI research and product lab that turns a single photo into a real-time, talking video avatar - the visual face for voice agents and chatbots. Its Lemon Slice-2 model is a purpose-built, large-scale video diffusion transformer that generates every pixel from scratch to produce expressive, full-emotion talking characters (human or cartoon) that livestream at conversational speed. Founded in 2024 by three PhD-creators (formerly Infinity AI), the company raised a $10.5M seed led by Matrix Partners and Y Combinator to make all video interactive.
Pika
Pika is a San Francisco-based generative AI company building a consumer video platform that turns text, images, and clips into short cinematic videos. Founded in 2023 by Stanford AI Lab alumni Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, Pika has shipped a string of fast-iterating model releases (Pika 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2) and viral features like Pikaffects, Scene Ingredients, and Pikaframes. The company has raised roughly $135M from Spark Capital, Lightspeed, Greycroft, and others.