Latest news with #Flux
National Business Review
03-06-2025
- Business
- National Business Review
Meridian ends billing software project in favour of Kraken
Electricity generator and retailer Meridian has abandoned its in-house retail billing platform Flux in favour of the Kraken platform provided by UK-based Octopus Energy Group. In a statement to the NZX Meridian said 53 jobs would go at Flux, reducing its workforce from 121 to 68. Remaining staff
Scoop
03-06-2025
- Business
- Scoop
Meridian Selects Kraken As Retail Technology Partner
Press Release – Meridian Kraken will replace Meridian subsidiary Flux, which currently delivers the billing platform for Meridian and Powershop. Flux will continue to maintain this billing platform while a phased migration to Kraken takes place. This will begin in July … Meridian Energy has selected UK-based Kraken as the core technology partner for its Retail business, which supports 400,000 homes and businesses through the Meridian and Powershop Retail brands. The scope of the contract includes a new billing platform that will play a key role as part of a broader technology stack to underpin the delivery of Meridian's new retail strategy. Kraken is also contracted to provide migration services using a proprietary approach that has successfully migrated many of the largest energy companies in the world over the past four years. Meridian Chief Customer Officer Lisa Hannifin says the company is focused on reducing the overall cost of energy for customers, and the key role that technology will play makes Kraken an ideal partner. 'Customers want more affordable energy and an increasing range of options for how and when they use it. We're focused on finding ways to deliver value back to customers, saving them time and money, and new technology will play a vital and wide-ranging role in this.' 'Kraken knows the energy sector intimately, have an excellent billing system and can help us unlock the power of AI. They are specialists in working with energy and other utilities to use AI to enhance customer experiences and make the development of new products quicker and easier than ever before, and that's exactly what we're looking for,' says Lisa Hannifin. Meridian completed a strategic reset and restructure of its Retail business in late 2024 to enable the business to meet changing technology and consumer needs. It has since launched three new products (Smart Hot Water, Smart EV Charging and the Four Hours Free Plan), with more to come over the coming months. This reset is delivering results, with customer growth of 8% since June 2024. Kraken Managing Director, APAC Mark Soper says the company is excited to partner with Meridian and bring the benefits of world leading technology to Meridian and Powershop customers. 'Meridian is already a leading energy retailer that will leverage Kraken's best in class platform and AI capabilities to deliver even better outcomes for its customers and business. Our partnership represents a major milestone for Kraken as we continue to invest in serving New Zealand, one of the world's most advanced and innovative energy markets' says Mark Soper. Kraken will replace Meridian subsidiary Flux, which currently delivers the billing platform for Meridian and Powershop. Flux will continue to maintain this billing platform while a phased migration to Kraken takes place. This will begin in July and is expected to be completed within 12 months. 'The Flux team is first-rate, and its billing platform has done an excellent job for Meridian and Powershop, but the retail landscape is changing, and we now need a much broader technology stack,' says Lisa Hannifin. Last May Meridian announced that Flux was stepping away from international growth opportunities and refocusing on its core customers in the New Zealand and Australian markets. Flux's other customer, Shell Energy, has a contract through to September 2026. Meridian will now consider the future of the subsidiary beyond supporting the transition to Kraken. In the meantime, Flux has implemented a new structure to reflect the focus on customer migration, reducing its workforce from 121 to 68. Interim CEO Bharat Ratanpal will return to his role as Meridian Chief Information Officer on 1 July 2025, with Flux management to report into Meridian's Retail business.
Scoop
02-06-2025
- Business
- Scoop
Meridian Selects Kraken As Retail Technology Partner
Meridian Energy has selected UK-based Kraken as the core technology partner for its Retail business, which supports 400,000 homes and businesses through the Meridian and Powershop Retail brands. The scope of the contract includes a new billing platform that will play a key role as part of a broader technology stack to underpin the delivery of Meridian's new retail strategy. Kraken is also contracted to provide migration services using a proprietary approach that has successfully migrated many of the largest energy companies in the world over the past four years. Meridian Chief Customer Officer Lisa Hannifin says the company is focused on reducing the overall cost of energy for customers, and the key role that technology will play makes Kraken an ideal partner. 'Customers want more affordable energy and an increasing range of options for how and when they use it. We're focused on finding ways to deliver value back to customers, saving them time and money, and new technology will play a vital and wide-ranging role in this.' 'Kraken knows the energy sector intimately, have an excellent billing system and can help us unlock the power of AI. They are specialists in working with energy and other utilities to use AI to enhance customer experiences and make the development of new products quicker and easier than ever before, and that's exactly what we're looking for,' says Lisa Hannifin. Meridian completed a strategic reset and restructure of its Retail business in late 2024 to enable the business to meet changing technology and consumer needs. It has since launched three new products (Smart Hot Water, Smart EV Charging and the Four Hours Free Plan), with more to come over the coming months. This reset is delivering results, with customer growth of 8% since June 2024. Kraken Managing Director, APAC Mark Soper says the company is excited to partner with Meridian and bring the benefits of world leading technology to Meridian and Powershop customers. 'Meridian is already a leading energy retailer that will leverage Kraken's best in class platform and AI capabilities to deliver even better outcomes for its customers and business. Our partnership represents a major milestone for Kraken as we continue to invest in serving New Zealand, one of the world's most advanced and innovative energy markets' says Mark Soper. Kraken will replace Meridian subsidiary Flux, which currently delivers the billing platform for Meridian and Powershop. Flux will continue to maintain this billing platform while a phased migration to Kraken takes place. This will begin in July and is expected to be completed within 12 months. 'The Flux team is first-rate, and its billing platform has done an excellent job for Meridian and Powershop, but the retail landscape is changing, and we now need a much broader technology stack,' says Lisa Hannifin. Last May Meridian announced that Flux was stepping away from international growth opportunities and refocusing on its core customers in the New Zealand and Australian markets. Flux's other customer, Shell Energy, has a contract through to September 2026. Meridian will now consider the future of the subsidiary beyond supporting the transition to Kraken. In the meantime, Flux has implemented a new structure to reflect the focus on customer migration, reducing its workforce from 121 to 68. Interim CEO Bharat Ratanpal will return to his role as Meridian Chief Information Officer on 1 July 2025, with Flux management to report into Meridian's Retail business.
Business Insider
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
Read the pitch deck an AI video startup behind viral baby podcast memes used to raise $32 million from A16z and others
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.'
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Hedra, the app used to make talking baby podcasts, raises $32M from a16z
People are using AI video generation tools to contribute to an unexpected new viral trend: podcasts featuring AI-generated talking babies. And one of the companies helping artists do this is Hedra. The startup, launched in 2023, offers a web-based video generation and editing suite powered by its Character-3 model, which lets users make videos with an AI-generated character as the focus, as well as transfer styles across images and audio. This is what people are using to make podcast videos like this one, in which an AI-generated dog talks about what it's like to live with a new baby in the house. We're not sure how much Hedra has benefited from this trend, but it's receiving ample investor attention nevertheless: the company on Thursday said it has raised $32 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz's Infrastructure fund. Its previous investors are participating in the round, and a16z's Matt Bornstein will join the startup's board. Michael Lingelbach, the company's founder and CEO (pictured below), told TechCrunch the startup was inspired by the gap he noticed between companies like Synthesia, which let users superimpose AI-generated avatars over presentations, and startups like Runway, which provide video generation tools for creating short clips. "I thought what if we did something at the intersection of video generation and 3D characters, with long dialogues and better controllability," he said. Hedra launched its first video model in June 2024, and quickly attracted investor interest, securing $10 million in seed funding from Index Ventures, Abstract Ventures, and a16z speedrun. Earlier this year, Amazon also backed the company through its venture capital arm, Alexa Fund. Lingelbach noted that the launch of the Character-3 model in March was a big inflection point (shortly after the company signed its term sheet with a16z), and is now driving a lot of user growth. The startup wants to use fresh cash to train its next model, which it says enables better customization, as well as develop technology to let its AI-generated characters interact with users. The company is now focusing on attracting creators and prosumers, and said it has received inbound interest from marketing departments of enterprises as well. While Hedra's own model is centered around character movement and expression, the app lets you employ other models like Veo 2 and Kling for video generation; Flux, Imagen3, Sana, and Ideogram V2 for image generation; and audio models from ElevenLabs and Cartesia for voice generation or cloning. Hedra's competitors include Captions (also backed by a16z), which is focused more on smartphones; Greycroft-backed Cheehoo, which works with Hollywood studios to create animated features; Synthesia, and HeyGen. Hedra claims the videos generated with its platform have more expressive characters than those made using its competition. a16z's Bornstein thinks that as the AI-powered video generation space evolves, we will see more tools focusing on characters, motion, voice, editing and the like. "AI companies can produce amazing clips of environments and simple actions. But they can't generate meaningful dialogue or animation. It's not just about making a video, it's about making a story that resonates. This is largely down to the people and characters in the story. That's exactly what Hedra is building," he told TechCrunch in an emailed statement. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
