Sensay - digital replicas, on demand 110 countries visited "Putting the humanity back into the AI" Philosophy → restaurants → crypto → AI Third book: Endless - Life After Upload Founded 2023 Sensay - digital replicas, on demand 110 countries visited "Putting the humanity back into the AI" Philosophy → restaurants → crypto → AI Third book: Endless - Life After Upload Founded 2023
Dan Thomson, founder and CEO of Sensay
DAN THOMSON / FOUNDER & CEO, SENSAY / CURRENTLY: MEXICO CITY, AND ANYWHERE ELSE
The Memory Issue

Dan Thomson

He builds AI clones of living people. The idea arrived the year a head injury erased his own memory - and he decided nobody else's should vanish so quietly.

Founder Author Investor Nomad

A company about permanence, run by a man with no address.

Sensay sells digital replicas. You feed it your emails, your voice notes, your Slack threads, the way you answer a question at 2am, and it returns a version of you that keeps working after you have logged off. Customer service that sounds like the founder. A grandparent who can still tell the story about the boat. A sales rep who never sleeps and never forgets a name.

Dan Thomson started it in 2023 and runs it as CEO. The product is unusual. The founder more so. He has a philosophy degree from King's College London, an MBA from Cambridge, and a machine-learning certificate from Harvard. In between he ran restaurants and launched Europe's first crypto index fund in Gibraltar. He has visited 110 countries and, for more than five years, lived in none of them for long.

The thread connecting all of it is memory - how fragile it is, and what happens to everything a person knows when they are gone. Sensay's first users were not corporations. They were families of people with dementia, looking for a way to hold on to a voice.

ChatGPT is clever, but it does not know you prefer taco trucks to fine dining. - Dan Thomson
110+
Countries Visited
5+
Years Nomadic
3
Books On Memory
55M
People With Dementia He Aims To Reach

2010. The year he forgot himself.

A head injury took out both his short-term and long-term memory. For a while the man who studied the philosophy of identity got to live the question directly: if you are a collection of stories, what is left when the stories go missing?

He had already decided, in lecture halls, that people are "just a combination of stories and everything we are is fleeting." Losing his own gave the abstraction teeth. He wrote a book. The book became a thesis. The thesis became Sensay.

Years later the same question arrived from the other side - watching dementia take hold of people he loved, slowly, a name at a time. That is why Sensay launched not as an enterprise sales tool but as memory care: lifelike replicas built so a family could keep a conversation going.

We are just a combination of stories, and everything we are is fleeting. - Dan Thomson, on the idea behind Sensay

What A Replica Does

LearnsVoice, style, knowledge
FromEmails, chats, docs, reports
Works AsSales, support, community
Or AsA legacy you pass on
Owned ByYou
RuleExtension, not replacement
The Route

An unlikely path to artificial people.

2010
A head injury erases his memory. The terror of disappearing becomes the seed of everything that follows.
Early 2010s
Studies existentialism and the philosophy of identity, then trades the seminar room for the kitchen - working as a restaurateur in hospitality.
Mid 2010s
Launches Europe's first crypto index fund in Gibraltar, then moves deeper into Web3.
Late 2010s - early 2020s
Director of business development at InsurAce, a decentralized insurance protocol; CMO and later strategic advisor at MetaRisk, a blockchain-enhanced risk financing firm.
2023
Founds Sensay. Starts with dementia care and memory preservation, then expands replicas into business: support, sales, community and beyond.
2025 - 2026
Speaks at Web Summit Lisbon on digital immortality. Settles loosely in Mexico City and writes his third book, "Endless - Life After Upload."
In His Words

On clones, ethics and the option to live forever.

We are putting the humanity back into the AI.

When you replicate humans you face every ethical boundary at once.

We think of the replica as an extension of the person, never as mandatory, never as a job killer.

It is a tool, an option, something you can pass to your kids if you want.

Watch

Hear it from the source.

Footnotes

Things that do not fit on a slide.

110+ countries, passport permanently warm
Five years a full-time nomad, no fixed home
Ran restaurants before he ran an AI company
Launched Europe's first crypto index fund in Gibraltar
Angel investor, $1M+ across AI, Web3 and hospitality
CV reads: philosopher, chef, financier, founder
On book number three about memory

The bet: what you know should not die when you do.

Strip away the avatars and the tokenomics, and Sensay is one stubborn idea wearing a software jacket. A person is a library. Libraries burn. Thomson is trying to make backups - for grieving families first, for businesses second, and for anyone who likes the thought of a self that keeps answering.

He is careful about the word immortality. A replica, he insists, is an option you can hand to your kids, not an obligation and not a replacement. The philosophy graduate who once lost his memory now spends his days deciding exactly how much of a person a machine should be allowed to keep.

What a time to be alive. - Dan Thomson
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Sources: danthomson.ai, sensay.io, LinkedIn, BlockTelegraph, AllAboutAI, Verdict, BlockLeaders, Web Summit, Brave New Coin. Profile compiled from public interviews and statements.