Hedra is a research and infrastructure lab building physical world models and the inference to deploy them at scale. Backed by top investors at Index, a16z, and Abstract Ventures, we’ve built the foundations for full-stack visual intelligence in the next era of AI.
Today our API serves both first- and third-party models to production customers, and our agent works within a single workflow to create content from scratch, manipulate existing assets, critique its own outputs, and repurpose them on demand. We’re scaling from frontier research into the infrastructure the rest of the industry will build on.
We started by commercializing action-conditioned, real-time interactive video generation. We’re now extending that foundation to the broader class of physical world models that perception, robotics, and media generation all run on.
At Hedra, we’re a team of hard-working, passionate individuals seeking to fundamentally change how visual intelligence gets built and deployed, and to build a generational company together. You should have startup experience and be a self-starter driven to build impactful products that change the status quo.
The team is fully in-person in SF with a shared love of solving hard problems.
Michael Lingelbach (CEO) — Before taking a leave of absence to start Hedra, Michael was a PhD researcher in Stanford’s Vision & Learning Lab, jointly advised by Fei-Fei Li and Jiajun Wu. He is co-first author on BEHAVIOR, a landmark embodied-AI benchmark, and has published at top conferences including CoRL, ICRA, and ICML (with a CoRL 2022 Best Paper nomination), with prior experience on NVIDIA robotics and simulation. He’s a passionate cinephile, former thespian, and huge fan of Denis Villeneuve.