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.