Money continues to flow into tech startups that have their sights set on eliminating every single last animation artist. On the same day that Cartwheel announced a $10 million funding round, San Francisco-based Hedra, a web-based AI animation and video generator, revealed that it has raised $32 million in Series A Funding.
The latest round, which increases Hedra’s total funding to $44 million since last year, was led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Infrastructure fund (a16z Infra), with participation from existing investors, including A16z Speedrun, Abstract, and Index Ventures. Amazon’s Alexa Fund is also a backer. Per Reuters, after this latest funding round, the company is valued around $200 million.
Here is more about Hedra’s business:
Hedra was founded by Michael Lingelbach, who is also CEO. His bio says that he is a former stage actor, an experience that has shaped his belief that characters are at the heart of every story: “We’re building the next generation of storytelling technology to empower content creators and enterprise marketers to tell narratives at scale on their own. Getting over the uncanny valley of compelling performance is the hardest frontier in video, and with our Character-3 foundation model, we’re devoted to crossing it.”
Hedra’s Character-3 claims to be the first omnimodal foundation model that blends text, image, and audio to create “highly controllable, expressive” character performance videos. The company differentiates its product from other AI video generators by promoting a “unified solution that integrates story, sound, and video generation” into a single workflow. Lingelbach told Techcrunch that he wanted Hedra to be a product “at the intersection of video generation and 3d characters, with long dialogues and better controllability.”
Hedra currently employs 20 people and plans to triple its headcount to 60 by the end the 2025. Besides additional hiring, the company will use the new funding to train its next model that will offer enhanced customization features. It also plans to develop new tech that allows interactive experiences between users and AI-generated characters.
Hedra’s model has had increased visibility in recent weeks because of the “baby AI” trend in which adults are reimagined as animated babies (example below):