digital-humans
(7)
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.
UneeQ
UneeQ builds AI-powered digital humans - lifelike, real-time animated avatars that give chatbots and enterprise AI a human face, voice and body language. Founded in New Zealand in 2009 as FaceMe and now headquartered in Austin, Texas, the company pairs its Synanim synthetic-animation engine and Synapse AI-orchestration brain to deploy digital humans for customer experience, brand engagement and immersive employee training across banking, airlines, telecom, retail, healthcare and government.
Soul Machines
Soul Machines was a New Zealand-founded, San Francisco-headquartered deep-tech company that built lifelike, animated 'Digital People' - AI-driven avatars powered by a patented Digital Brain and Autonomous Animation technology modeled on human neuroscience. Spun out of the University of Auckland by Academy Award-winning technologist Dr. Mark Sagar and serial entrepreneur Greg Cross in 2016, it raised roughly US$135 million to bring emotionally responsive virtual humans to brands like Nestlé, P&G and the World Health Organization. After both founders departed and major customers moved on, the company was placed into receivership in February 2026.
Tavus
Tavus is a San Francisco AI company building the interface for face-to-face conversation between humans and machines. Its Conversational Video Interface (CVI) lets developers add real-time, emotionally aware AI video agents - what Tavus calls PALs - to any app through an API. Backed by CRV, Sequoia, Scale Venture Partners, Y Combinator and HubSpot Ventures, Tavus raised a $40M Series B in November 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $82M.
Fundamental Research Labs
Fundamental Research Labs (formerly Altera) is a San Francisco applied AI research company building autonomous, socially intelligent agents - what it calls 'digital human beings.' Founded by former MIT computational neuroscientist Dr. Robert Yang, the company ships consumer and prosumer products including Shortcut (a superhuman Excel agent) and Fairies (a general-purpose AI assistant), and raised a $33M Series A in August 2025 led by Prosus Ventures.
Eric Jang
Eric Seyoung Jang is the Founder and CEO of DeepBrain AI, a Palo Alto-based company building hyper-realistic AI avatars, video synthesis technology, and conversational AI systems. Inspired by AlphaGo's 2016 defeat of Go champion Lee Sedol, he pivoted from fintech to artificial intelligence and built what became the first company to commercially deploy video synthesis at scale - from AI news anchors in Chinese broadcast studios to AI bankers in Korean bank branches. Under his leadership, DeepBrain AI raised $44M in Series B funding at a $180M valuation and set its sights on becoming the world's leading generative AI enterprise.
Robert Yang
Robert Yang (Guangyu Robert Yang) is a computational neuroscientist turned AI founder who left a tenure-track professorship at MIT to build Fundamental Research Labs (formerly Altera), a company creating socially intelligent AI agents. Trained in physics at Peking University, with a PhD from NYU and postdoc at Columbia, Yang became a 2022 Searle Scholar before pivoting to the startup world in December 2023. His company made waves running 1,000 autonomous AI agents in Minecraft — watching them spontaneously develop religions, trade economies, and social hierarchies — and has since raised over $45M to bring that vision into enterprise productivity tools and beyond.