Michael Lingelbach

Lingelbach pursued a PhD at Stanford University under Jiajun Wu and Fei-Fei LiFei-Fei LiFei-Fei Li is an American computer scientist, a professor of computer science at Stanford University and founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and the co-founder and CEO of the spatial intelligence company World Labs. She led the creation of ImageNet and has served as a vice president at Google and chief scientist of Google Cloud, as well as an independent director of Twitter. Since 2026, she has served as senior advisor on artificial intelligence to Stanford’s president and co-chair of the HAI advisory council.Open the full entry, working on visual reinforcement learning and simulation for robotics and publishing at conferences including CoRL; after founding Hedra he was on leave from the doctoral program.⁠[1][2]

Hedra, the AI video company founded by Lingelbach, launched in 2023 and released its first video model in June 2024. He recalled that the idea came from a gap between Synthesia, which overlays AI avatars on presentations, and Runway, which generates short video clips: “what if we did something at the intersection of video generation and 3D characters.”⁠[3]

Hedra had earlier raised a $10 million seed round from investors including Index VenturesIndex VenturesIndex Ventures is a venture capital firm founded in Geneva in 1996. It invests from seed through growth and operates across London, San Francisco and New York, supporting technology companies through a transatlantic network.Open the full entry, Abstract Ventures and a16z speedruna16z speedruna16z speedrun is an early-stage startup accelerator program run by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z); selected teams take part in a 12-week residency in San Francisco and receive up to $1 million in investment.Open the full entry, and Amazon’s Alexa FundAlexa FundThe Alexa Fund is a corporate investment fund Amazon set up in June 2015 with up to $100 million for developers, hardware makers and startups working on voice technology. Amazon added another $100 million in 2017, and the fund later expanded into artificial intelligence, hardware and entertainment.Open the full entry invested in early 2025. Hedra took part in cohort 002 of the a16z speedrun accelerator and is based in San Francisco.⁠[3][1]

In March 2025 Hedra launched its Character-3 model, which powers its web-based video generation and editing suite, letting users build videos around AI-generated characters and transfer styles across images and audio; the platform also integrates third-party models including Veo 2, Kling, Flux, Imagen3, Ideogram V2, ElevenLabsElevenLabsElevenLabs is an artificial intelligence audio company founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski. Starting from voice generation, voice cloning, and dubbing tools, it has built ElevenCreative for creators, the enterprise conversational agent platform ElevenAgents, and the developer interface ElevenAPI, and also operates music generation and voice licensing businesses.Open the full entry and Cartesia.⁠[3]

On May 15, 2025, Hedra announced a $32 million Series A led by Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry’s infrastructure fund, with participation from earlier investors; a16z’s Matt Bornstein joined Hedra’s board. The company planned to use the funds to train its next model and to build technology that lets AI characters interact with users.⁠[3]

The same day, a16z partners Justine Moore, Troy Kirwin, Jonathan Lai and Matt Bornstein published “Investing in Hedra,” describing how Hedra generates character videos with lip sync, facial emotion, gestures and background animation from an image plus an audio track or text script, and stating that nearly 3 million users had generated more than 10 million videos; the post said the a16z team had known “Michael Lingelbach and the team” for several years.⁠[4]

On August 14, 2025, a16z published “Why AI Characters & Virtual Influencers Are the Next Frontier in Video ft Hedra’s Michael Lingelbach” on YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry, in which Lingelbach appeared as Hedra’s founder to discuss AI characters and virtual influencers in video.⁠[5]

Hedra: Official website: https://hedra.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

X: Public account: https://x.com/mjlbach (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-lingelbach-81980917a/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]