Read the pitch deck an AI video startup behind viral baby podcast memes used to raise $32 million from A16z and others

Business Insider

15-05-2025

A video of a baby interviewing a dog on a podcast went viral last month.
No, it wasn't real. It was an AI-generated video created by comedian Jon Lajoie, who used Hedra, an AI video generation platform, to make the animation.
Hedra's platform allows users to generate images, video, and audio with its web-based content creation studio.
"Our model and technology focuses on the most controllable, compelling characters, whether that's a hyperrealistic human or an animated character or even an animal," Hedra's CEO, Michael Lingelbach, told Business Insider.
On Thursday, Hedra announced that it raised a $32 million Series A fundraising round led by Andreessen Horowitz's Infrastructure fund. The round included returning investors such as A16z Speedrun, Abstract, and Index Ventures.
Since its launch in 2024, the AI video startup has rapidly raised capital. In August, it announced a $10 million seed investment round. In March, Amazon 's Alexa Fund announced that it invested in the startup and several other AI companies. Hedra said it has raised a total of $44 million but has not disclosed a valuation.
Competition in the generative AI is hot, with buzzy companies like Captions, HeyGen, Synthesia, and Runway building tech around video and avatars (Hedra specified that it is not an avatar company).
"We're not trying to compete with Google Veo, we're not trying to compete with Sora," Lingelbach said. "We're focusing really firmly on building the best character models, and that's something that with this additional capital we can make another step function in doing."
Hedra's Character-3 "omnimodal" model combines images, text, and audio to generate video. Creating a character with Hedra begins by uploading an image and then uploading audio that they've either already recorded (like a podcast) or generated using text-to-speech models like ElevenLabs.
"Both voice and video are seeing rapid evolution right now," Lingelbach said. "We took a big leap forward on naturalness of expression with our current model."
Hedra's platform is also users to integrate outside models like ElevenLabs, Google Veo, and Flux "all in one workflow," Lingelbach said.
Hedra's core user base has been professional creators and marketers, Lingelbach said.
"We're already seeing a massive influx of AI-generated content," Lingelbach said. "My Instagram and TikTok feed are filled with various memes and also more serious content now that's AI-generated."
From comedy skits to faceless creator content to … talking babies, Hedra's already seen a wide range of use cases. Podcast content, particularly, has been a popular application of Hedra's tech.
"It's not really something that we anticipated initially, but it definitely has been driving a lot of our usage," he said.
In addition to the viral trend of AI baby-hosted podcasts that people have been creating using Hedra, others have used Hedra to create Studio Ghibli-style videos of the classic podcast interview clip.
With its recent raise, Hedra plans to expand into more enterprise marketing applications, expand its team, and open an office in New York City.
Note: Some slides have been redacted in order to share the deck publicly.
Hedra
Hedra is focused on storytelling and characters.
The deck explains Hedra's 'omnimodal foundation model' that lets people quickly generate digital characters.
Here's what the slide says:
At Hedra, we've built the world's best character performance model that uniquely combines video, voice, motion, and emotion in a way never before possible.
Hedra's Character-3 model is the world's first omnimodal foundation model in production.
The only model that supports human, animated, and animal characters. And it works with any angle or framing.
Built to prioritize efficiently scaling unified models
The entire model was developed with a budget of under $2 million
Hedra's customers range from everyday consumers to creators and marketers.
The deck highlights Hedra's research team and its proprietary tech.
Hedra
Then the deck introduces the team.
Here's what the slide says:
We've assembled the best team to own this category — marrying deep research with AI-Native product design.
Key Leadership Team:
Michael Lingelbach: Founder / CEO
Stanford PhD student of Fei-Fei Li and Jiajun Wu. Senior author of 3 real-time diffusion papers. Recipient of prestigious Stanford Graduate Fellowship.
Hongwei Yi: Head of Research
Former PhD Student of Michael Black, principal researcher behind first audio to video diffusion model to hit the market in the US.
Wei Li: Research Lead
Core contributor to Google Bard/Gemini, PaLM-2 and T5, with 8+ years experience at Google Brain/Deepmind.
Jason Wilson: Head of Engineering
Previously led engineering at Nava Benefits (Thrive-backed Series B startup) and engineering manager at Descartes Labs.
Alan Guo: Chief of Staff
MBA from Harvard Business School. Previously worked in growth & strategy at Disney, Jubilee Media, and Firework.
Ramin Keene: Principal Engineer
Hedra concludes its deck by saying 'we're just getting started.'