A few years ago, several startups with a specific focus on digital avatars appeared because of all the metaverse buzz. While that buzz died down, generative AI has given a new life to avatars as it is easier to spin up different virtual identities. Companies are trying out different use cases for avatars, including D-ID and Synthesia in the enterprise space, Zoom for meetings, Glance for fashion, Praktika for learning, and TikTok and Captions in the creator space.
However, Isaac Bratzel, who created popular virtual influencers such as Lil Miquela and Amelia 2.0, thinks there is a lack of high-quality avatars that not just look great but have personalized traits. And that thought process led him to build AvatarOS.
Bratzel previously worked in design roles at IPsoft (where he created Amelia 2.0), virtual influencer company Brud (where he created Lil Miquela), and Dapper Labs after the company acquired Brud. He started AvatarOS after he left Dapper Labs in 2022.
The company said it closed a seed funding round of $7 million led by M13’s Latif Peracha with participation from Andreessen Horowitz Games Fund, HF0, Valia Ventures, and Mento VC.
AvatarOS is in an exploratory phase to find the right product-market fit. Bratzel noted that the company is aware that customers don’t always want or need what you can do as a company, technologically, or what is cool.
As for M13, Peracha said that this is an exploratory round and the opportunity to back a founder who has a robust track record in the avatar space.
“We are going to look at the right business model through this round of exploration and have a bit more clarity on the way forward. We think that because of Isaac’s history in IPsoft to Brud, he is clearly the right person to build the business,” he said.
He also added that he did part of the due diligence by talking to an avatar of Bratzel to know more about the founder.
The founder said that AvatarOS is geared toward making high-end avatars in 3D space rather than catering to a world of click-to-generate content.
“One obvious parallel is spam emails. When it is easy to create content, it proliferates everywhere, and you want to have that differentiation from the saturation of content. That’s where we want to be in the avatar space,” Bratzel told TechCrunch over a call.
“While there are existing products that have tech for avatar generation, we want to focus on the avatar itself. If you look at Lil Miquela … That is a permanent entity beyond one single project and was able to accrue value over time,” he added.
The company is currently onboarding beta users and giving them access to a few existing avatars. The startup is also releasing a simple API that clients can use to integrate avatars with their sites. Bratzel said these organizations can power these avatars with large language models (LLMs) to provide info, and also change things like camera angles and views.
AvatarOS currently creates premium and customized avatars for clients themselves. But down the line, it wants to provide more tools for creation and adjustment to clients. Bratzel said the company’s main differentiation would be the way avatars move in their space.
“The main thing that is important to us is the humans move in a unique way. Pretty much every avatar solution can create something that might look like you but moves generically. Our view is that humans don’t move in the same way, and we want to recreate that,” he said.
The company will use the funding to grow its team and also build out a machine learning-based deformer that is responsible for creating lifelike movements in avatars.