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AI Video Creation Platform Honor $10 million in seed capital raisedcontinuing demand for investments focused on artificial intelligence and interest in generative products based on AI.
Hedra, founded by former Nvidia, Google, and Meta employees, has investors including Index Ventures, Abstract, and A16Z Speedrun.
As a part of the seed round, Hedra also took its video-focused Character-1 foundation model out of the closet. The company said Character-1, which it presented to researchers in June, is “the fastest video foundation model on the market.”
“Until now, creators have had to make trade-offs between control and speed with generative video models,” the company said.[In June]Character-1, our research preview, showed that this is now not the case. Speed and ease of use are designed to turbocharge the productivity of content creators and marketers.”
Hedra said greater than 350,000 users have used the Character-1 platform and created greater than 1.6 million videos. The company said many of the videos created with Character-1 have gone viral on Reddit and Instagram. Hedra emphasized that it allows users to create AI pop stars and AI-generated content. It also desires to proceed improving its security and content moderation features.
The company plans to focus on making its platform more multimodal so it could “integrate story generation, audio, and video into one unified workflow.” Hedra hopes to streamline content creation to enable AI-powered customization of digital avatars and personas.
Hedra’s Character-1 is the latest video generation model to be released publicly in recent months. Haiper 1.5, which got here out of stealth in March, has been tipped to challenge OpenAI’s Sora. RunwayML, one of the pioneers of AI-generated video, publicly released its Gen-3 Alpha model in July, while Luma AI announced its Dream Machine immersive video platform in June.
Another video platform, Captions, raised $60 million in Series C funding in July.
Bigger firms like OpenAI and Google are also in the game when it involves creating videos with Gen AI. OpenAI’s Sora hasn’t been released to the public yet, but the company has worked with brands and filmmakers to showcase the platform. Google announced Veo in May.