Latest news with #Lingelbach
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.'
Forbes
15-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Action: Startups Race To Capture The AI Video Generation Market
Making video with AI Investors can't get enough of start-up artificial intelligence (AI) video generators. Data from Tracxn suggests these businesses have already raised more than $500 million of new funding in 2025 – more than in any previous year. The biggest rounds have included a $308 million raise from New York-based Runway and London-headquartered Synthesia's $180 million investment. And now California's Hedra is joining the party. Hedra, founded in San Francisco in 2024, will today announce it has raised $32 million of new finance from investors led by a16z Infra, with existing investors including a16z speedrun, Abstract and Index Ventures also participating. This round brings the total amount of money raised by the company to $43 million. Investors' appetite for the growing number of young businesses in the space reflects the rapid growth in the market, itself a reflection of the pace at which AI video technology is advancing. Allied Market Research estimates the global market for these ventures was worth around $600 million in 2023 – but predicts that this figure will rise to $9.3 billion by 2033. That represents annual growth of more than 30% a year. The key is to make it as easy as possible to create AI video so that you capture a wider base of customers, says Michael Lingelbach, the founder and CEO of Hedra. In particular, he expects there to be huge demand from enterprises looking to create AI video for brand-building and marketing activity; these firms will need workflow tools that make the process of creation easy, as well as a high-quality output. 'Video AI has huge advantages for enterprise,' Lingelbach says. 'They can get content out very rapidly to capture market moments or cultural references; they can iterate content fast, to test which video performs best, say, or to produce video for multiple local markets in multiple languages, and they can create content that really engages their audiences.' This is an emerging trend. Until relatively recently, AI video was largely the preserve of enthusiastic individual creators, often producing content with the aim of going viral on social media platforms. Hedra, for example, says 2.5 million users have already used its technology to make such videos. More recently, however, enterprises have begun to see the potential of this medium, particularly as quality has improved. Many platforms only allow you to make short clips with no sound, but the latest models are far more expansive. Hedra, founded in 2024, launched the latest version of its model, dubbed Character-3, earlier this year, and Lingelback says it has already seen significant interest from enterprise users. Matt Bornstein, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the investment firm behind a16z Infra, argues that Hedra's latest model is a significant step forward for the sector, offering the opportunity to make broader content that solutions focused more narrowly on avatars or specific use cases. 'Character-3 is a breakthrough model that integrates text, video and audio to create highly controllable, expressive characters,' he says. 'If you want to create AI-driven actors, it's the best model in the market by far.' Rival providers will naturally make similar claims for their own platforms – and there is no doubt that the sector now faces something of an arms race. This year's spate of fund raising reflects the need for significant investment in product development and engineering teams as firms vie for market share. The threat of big tech also looms large – OpenAI and Adobe have already launched video generators while Google and Meta have projects in development. The race is on. "This new investment will help us develop a new generation of AI-powered video experiences that are interactive, real-time, and personalised,' said Victor Riparbelli, CEO and co-founder of Synthesia, when it announced its fund raising earlier this year. '[That offers] possibilities we could have only imagined when we founded the company in 2017.' At Runway, CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela made a similar point when unveiling its funding round last month, pointing to the progress made with its newly released Gen-4 mode. 'These advancements aren't merely incremental improvements; they form the foundation for an entirely new approach to media,' he said. For now, with so many players now scaling at pace, it's difficult to call the likely winners. Investors, certainly, are hedging their bets. Still, for the AI video sector as a whole, the future looks bright, with a new generation of platforms making it more straightforward than ever before for everyone from individual users to large enterprises to produce high-quality content.
