Khyberthe creative AI studio behind the music videos of popular artists Kid Cudi and Linkin Park, today announced the launch of its new mobile app to provide creators, musicians and artists with a range of AI tools including text-to-video, image – to video and video to video.
Founded in 2022, Kaiber leverages various open source projects such as AnimatedDiff, Automatic1111, ControlNet, and Deforum, among others. It also touts a proprietary layer of technology to bring it all together into one artistic tool.
Like other AI video creators (Runway, Meta’s Make-A-Video, and Google’s Imagen Video), Kaiber allows users to either upload images/videos or type in their own ideas to create animated content.
Kaiber offers two types of animation styles – “Flipbook”, a frame-by-frame effect, or “Motion”, a fluid style where content transitions smoothly between frames. Users can describe how they want the video to look or choose from themes and styles prompted by Kaiber.
Kaiber allows users to customize the camera movement, whether they want the animation to zoom in/out, rotate clockwise or counterclockwise, or move up, down, left, or right. There are also different aspect ratios, depending on the platform the creator wants to upload the video to. For example, 16:9 for YouTube, 9:16 for TikTok and 1:1, 3:4 or 4:3 for Instagram. The longest allowed video length is eight minutes, but the company plans to support longer videos in the future. Videos take 30 minutes to create.
Image Credits: Khyber
Additionally, users can add their own music, making the app an affordable alternative for independent artists who don’t want to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to an animation studio for a single video. Additionally, Kaiber includes an Audio Reactivity feature, meaning the output responds to whatever sound the user plays.
“Our mobile app brings Kaiber’s core features — like text-to-video, picture-to-video, and video-to-video — into a compact, user-friendly format,” co-founder and CEO Victor Wang told TechCrunch.
Wang added, “While some advanced tools such as integrated story creation and specific text-to-video models remain web-only, customers should expect feature parity very soon.”
Alongside the app’s launch, Kaiber partnered with three independent artists to launch a Create With feature, which is exclusive to the mobile experience. Users can create content using music and AI creative styles that cater to each artist.
One artist in particular is the company’s co-founder and CTO — Eric Gao, whose stage name is Oksami. It has over 53,000 Spotify listeners and nearly 58,000 YouTube subscribers. Users can sample four of his most popular songs, including Midnight Diner, which has over 1 million streams on Spotify. The two other artists featured in the app are Jung Bae and August Camp.
When it comes to commercial rights, creators who pay for an account own the videos they create. Users with free accounts receive a Commons Noncommercial 4.0 Attribution International License, meaning they have a license to use the content but cannot sell it. Videos made with a free account will come with the Kaiber logo watermark.
Kaiber also offers an affiliate program, which allows creators to earn a 10% commission on membership referrals. Affiliates continue to earn a commission for as long as the referred customer remains a subscriber.
The Kaiber app is available at iOS and Android devices. There are three subscription levels: Explorer ($5/month for 300 credits), Pro ($15/month for 1,000 credits), and Artist ($30/month for 2,500 credits). One credit equals one second of video. However, the credit cost also varies depending on the feature used. There’s also a seven-day free trial that comes with 100 credits.
“Our core thesis is that the creative process is hard,” co-founder and chief creative officer Jacky Lu told us. “But the creative process has common denominators across all modalities, such as music, video, images and other art forms—people make things with similar patterns. And to make the best art, we need intuitive and simple tools and the ability to inspire others. Now with gen AI, we can make art with others and with machines.”
Kaiber came out of beta last May with over 2 million users. Now, the company advertises more than 5 million records. Kid Cudi’s AI lyric videos and Linkin Park’s AI’s music video helped put Kaiber’s name on the map, along with a TikTok viral trend called “Star Leap”. The company’s studio technology offering — Kaiber Studios — has supported over 2 million artists with productive audio and video, including Grimes, Wu-Tang Clan, Money Man, Don Diablo and Mike Shinoda.
Kaiber is completely closed. In the first few months of launch, the company reported seven-figure gross revenue.
Wang and Gao are childhood best friends whose mothers immigrated to America from Shanghai together. They launched their first startup, Secret garden, in February 2022 in response to the web3 NFT craze. The company’s first sale grossed $1.2 million, earning about $300,000, enough to get the business off the ground. Unfortunately though, the FTX crash wiped out Secret Garden’s funds and they had no choice but to fold.
“The crash of FTX.us tested our resilience, but our resolve only grew stronger, leading to the birth of Kaiber from the ashes of Secret Garden,” Wang said. “It’s a narrative of overcoming adversity, fueled by passion and an unwavering belief in the transformative power of artificial intelligence in music and the visual arts.”
