avatars
(3)
Danny Tomsett
Danny Tomsett is the founder and CEO of UneeQ, an enterprise AI company that builds lifelike digital humans for customer service, training, and marketing. A New Zealand entrepreneur who started building games at age eight and exited a telecom company at 25, he launched the business in 2009 as the video chat startup FaceMe before pivoting to CGI-driven digital humans. Under his leadership the company delivered high-profile projects like Nadia and Digital Einstein, won Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Business Challenge, and partnered with NVIDIA. He relocated the company's center of gravity to Austin, Texas in 2019.
Jeff Lu
Jeff (Jiajun) Lu is the founder and CEO of AKOOL, the generative AI video platform that ranked #1 on the Inc. 5000 list in 2025 with 37,364% revenue growth in three years. A PhD computer scientist who worked on Face ID at Apple and video processing at Google Cloud before building AKOOL on just 8 GPUs in 2020, Lu has turned a side project generating $100K into a $40M-revenue company powering AI avatars and real-time video translation for Coca-Cola, Amazon, Google, and Nvidia.
Aigerim Shorman
Aigerim Shorman is VP of Product Management for Meta's Horizon product, where she leads the platform connecting billions of people across virtual worlds. Born in Kazakhstan, she bootstrapped her way from community college to USC, taught with Teach For America, worked at UBS, and co-founded Triptrotting - a travel startup that raised $1.8M and grew to 150+ countries - before joining Meta where she built the avatar system used by 3+ billion people. One of the most senior women in Meta's metaverse organization, she's also an angel investor backing early-stage consumer and social startups.