Danny Tomsett

The long bet on a friendly face

Danny Tomsett has been building toward the same idea for most of his life: that people would rather talk to a face than a text box. It took the rest of the world about fifteen years to catch up.

He started early. By eight he was writing computer games. At 25 he founded a telecommunications company and later sold it, an exit that gave him the freedom to chase a bigger question. In 2009 he launched a startup called FaceMe in Auckland, New Zealand. The original pitch was simple - video chat that let customers speak with a real person for service. Useful, but bounded by the number of humans you could put on the other end of the line.

The pivot came as two technologies matured at once: conversational AI got good enough to hold a conversation, and visual rendering got good enough to make a face believable. Tomsett saw the intersection before most. FaceMe became UneeQ, and the product stopped being a way to reach a human and became a way to build one - a digital human, rendered in CGI, powered by AI, able to greet a customer, answer a question, and read the room.

Nadia, and the moment it got real

UneeQ's first headline digital human arrived in 2016. Nadia was built for Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme, a virtual agent designed to help people navigate a complex government service with patience and warmth. Her voice belonged to the actress Cate Blanchett. It was an early, public demonstration that a digital human could carry both function and feeling - not a gimmick on a screen, but a working interface people actually spoke to.

From there the roster grew. UneeQ built Digital Einstein, an interactive AI likeness of the physicist that anyone could chat with online, and it became one of the company's most recognizable calling cards. Behind the showpieces, the real business quietly took shape: digital humans deployed across banking, insurance, telecommunications, retail and healthcare, handling the kind of front-line conversations that used to require a call center.

A rule about honesty

As deepfakes turned synthetic faces into a trust problem, Tomsett drew a hard line. UneeQ's digital humans are rendered in CGI on purpose - clearly artificial, closer to a video game character than a forged video. The design choice is the ethics.

It is an unusual stance in a field racing toward photorealism, and it reflects how Tomsett thinks about trust. A brand's customers should always know they are talking to software. The value is in the experience being warm and useful, not in fooling anyone.

Moving the company to the market

In 2019 Tomsett made the kind of decision founders talk about for years afterward. He moved his family - his wife and four children - from Auckland to Austin, Texas, planting the company closer to the US enterprise customers it wanted to win. The recognition that followed the growth years validated the bet: a Deloitte Fast 50 spot in New Zealand on the back of 317% revenue growth, a finalist nod at EY Entrepreneur of the Year, and earlier, a win in Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Business Challenge.

The generative-AI wave that arrived in the 2020s did not create UneeQ. It vindicated it. Suddenly the market understood why a face on the interface might matter. In June 2024 Tomsett announced an integration with NVIDIA's ACE platform and put UneeQ digital humans on the main stage at COMPUTEX - a public marker that the long, patient build had reached the mainstream at exactly the moment the technology needed it.