Hedra, the a16z-backed startup best known for its Character-3 model that animates talking AI characters in videos, launched Model Factory, a service that trains, deploys and keeps retraining custom AI models for robotics, manufacturing, biology and defense customers. Companies bring their own data and simulators, and Hedra’s researchers work with AI agents to fine-tune a model, run it on rented GPUs or on site, then retrain it on how it performs in production. Hedra says its revenue grew 15 times over the past year, a figure it didn’t put a base on, and that it made one image-editing model about six times faster on the same hardware in under a week.
