
Hedra is building the next generation of storytelling technology to empower content creators and enterprise marketers to tell narratives at scale. We're starting by releasing Character-1, the fastest video foundation model on the market. It offers a longer-form generation and brings a new level of expressive control over character-centric video.

Until now, creators faced tradeoffs for control and speed via generative video models. Last month, Character-1, our research preview, showed that this is no longer the case. The speed and ease of use are designed to turbocharge the efficiency of content creators and marketers.

Today, we’re excited to formally bring Hedra out of stealth and share that we’ve raised a $10M Seed from Index Ventures, Abstract, and A16Z Speedrun.

Since our release in June, more than 350,000 users have created over 1.6 million video generations on our platform. We continue to see an explosion of creativity: minute-long dramatic monologues, a new wave of digital influencers, the rise of the AI popstar, marketing videos, and educational content built by teachers. We’ve seen viral hits topping Reddit, Instagram, and more. We've done all this while maintaining a leading moderation filter including screening language for violence. This was by design — we built Hedra with safety in mind and think it’s an important part of how this technology is used. We’re using first mover’s advantage to deploy models responsibly, with a leading moderation filter including screening language for violence, hate, and celebrity images.

Our team is now focused on building a new type of multimodal studio that complements our foundation model. Hedra will integrate story, sound, and video generation into one unified workflow tool, allowing users to create customizable digital avatars or characters with unique appearances, voices, and personalities. Our platform will not just streamline content creation — it will empower brands and creators to captivate audiences in ways inaccessible before Character-1.

We founded Hedra after leaving our PhDs at Stanford and after working in the industry at NVIDIA, Google, and Meta. As artificial intelligence moved mainstream, we saw a massive opportunity to create a new platform that allowed content creators, marketers, and businesses to leverage generative video workflows.
We’re grateful to our investors at A16Z Speedrun, Abstract, and Index Ventures as well as Jon Barron, David Benhaim, Kevin Hartz, Greg Mark, Robyn Peterson, Nikhila Ravi, John Rogovin, Bilawal Sidhu, and Outset Capital for their belief in Hedra’s team, technology, and ambition. We’re just getting started. We’re thrilled to invite creators from around the world to join us. We can’t wait to see what you make!

— Michael and Alex


Blog

Introducing Hedra, the video creation platform, with $10M in funding from Index Ventures, Abstract, and A16Z Speedrun