Hedra
Category: AI Infrastructure
Research and infrastructure company building models and inference/post-training systems for multimodal and physical AI, best known for its Character-3 AI video model. Hedra was founded in 2023. The company is led by Michael Lingelbach. Based in San Francisco, United States. Total funding raised: $44M. Latest round: Series A. Key investors include Andreessen Horowitz (a16z Infrastructure fund), Index Ventures, Abstract Ventures, a16z speedrun, Jon Barron, David Benhaim, Kevin Hartz.
- Founded
- 2023
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, United States
- Total funding
- $44M
Value proposition
Gives companies the capabilities of a frontier AI lab without building one: Hedra serves their multimodal and physical AI models faster and keeps improving them. Hedra Model Factory post-trains, deploys and continuously improves custom models.
Products and solutions
Hedra Model Factory (autonomous post-training and inference platform, launched 10 Nov 2026), Inference (managed model APIs and optimized serving), Model training (SFT and RL), GPU Sandboxes, World Model Runtime, Forward Deployed Researchers, Character-3 and H3 video models, Hedra Studio consumer video app.
Unique value
Combines frontier inference optimization, post-training by forward deployed researchers and autonomous AI agents, and a data flywheel (recursive self-improvement as a service) in one loop.
Target customer
Robotics, manufacturing, biology and defense teams; media generation companies; companies that need custom multimodal or physical AI models without an in-house research lab.
Industries served
Physical AI / robotics, manufacturing, biology, defense, media generation
Technology advantage
Inference optimization and distillation for multimodal models. Krea 3 median DiT time per edit fell from 22.9s to 3.3s on AMD Instinct MI355X. H3 retrained for physical consistency scored 34.9 on Physics-IQ vs 30.3 for H3 Max. Researchers from Stanford, Berkeley and UIUC with NVIDIA, Meta Superintelligence Labs and Fireworks AI experience.
How they differentiate
Pairs forward deployed researchers and agent-driven post-training with a specialized inference engine for image, video and world models, rather than offering only generic model hosting.
Main competitors
Fal.ai, Baseten, Together AI, Fireworks AI
Key partnerships
AMD (Instinct MI355X collaboration), Krea (Krea 3 runs on Hedra), a16z speedrun
Notable customers
Krea
Major milestones
2023 founded, Jun 2024 first video model launched, 2024 $10M seed, May 2025 $32M Series A led by a16z (reported ~$200M valuation), Character-3 model, 10 Nov 2026 launched Hedra Model Factory.
Growth metrics
Revenue grew 15x over the 12 months to Nov 2026 (company claim). More than 3 million users and over 10 million videos generated as of May 2025.
Market positioning
Pivoting from consumer and prosumer AI video creation to a research-and-infrastructure provider for multimodal and physical AI.
Geographic focus
United States / Global
About Michael Lingelbach
Ex-NVIDIA; Stanford University PhD (Stanford Vision and Learning Lab). Developer of the iGibson and BEHAVIOR robot simulation platforms; research on visual reinforcement learning, simulation and embodied AI. Former stage actor.
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Official website: https://www.hedra.com