Hedra launches Model Factory to build custom AI for robots and labs

Hedra, a San Francisco start-up best known for AI video, has launched a service that builds custom AI models for real-world uses. Called Hedra Model Factory, it is aimed at robotics, manufacturing, biology, and defence teams, the company said on Tuesday.

The service covers the stages after a model’s first training. Hedra will rent out computing power, help customers fine-tune models on their own data, run the models, and keep improving them once they are in use.

Hedra’s researchers will do much of this work alongside AI agents that run experiments on their own, the company said. Each model in use sends data back to improve the next version.

“The next step is the real world, where the data is video, sensors and simulation,” said Michael Lingelbach, Hedra’s founder and chief executive.

Customers can bring their own simulators and data, and Hedra will help build training environments around them. For firms without their own research teams, Hedra’s staff will also set up data collection and testing.

Models can run on the customer’s own servers or at a nearby Hedra partner data centre, the company said. Hedra will only release updated versions that pass tests set by the customer.

Hedra gave three examples of the work. In one, it said it made Krea 3, an image model from AI firm Krea, about six times faster. That took under a week, on the same AMD chips.

In another, Hedra retrained its own video model to better follow the laws of physics. The new version scored 34.9 on Physics-IQ, a test designed by Google DeepMind, against 30.3 for its earlier H3 Max model, the company said.

In a third, Hedra said it fixed a simulated robot that had been given a new gripper. It brought the robot’s success rate from near zero to near 100% without retraining.

Hedra said its revenue grew 15 times over the past year, but did not give figures. The company is backed by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Model Factory is available now on Hedra’s website. Teams can also rent computing power without a long-term contract, or run an existing model on Hedra’s systems.