Hand Crafted Humans Could be the Future of Business

Isaac Taylor

As businesses prepare themselves for a possible paradigm shift in digital communications we need to now reconsider how we might be interfacing with brands and services. New Zealand startup Soul Machines has been at the forefront of this frontier for years now. This pole position in digital services has lead to a second round of successful funding for the company bringing in an added US$70 million. The latest round of funding brings total investment in the company to US $135 million.

Soul Machines is in the business of creating lifelike digital avatars that can interact with customers via webcam, but it doesn’t seem like a massive leap to be interacting with the avatars in VR. Last year 12.5 million VR units were sold. This number had the breaks put on it as well as VR headsets were generally sold out around the world due to the ongoing supply chain issues Covid has left us with. Spending on VR software topped $2 billion last year as well, so to write VR off as a fad is to miss out on some real opportunities. It’s relatively small, but it’s growing like crazy.

We’ve had the opportunity to sit down for a chat with Greg Cross, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer before and he’s is both passionate and excited about what he’s creating with his team.

“I am thrilled to continue to work with innovative, global brands who understand the power of digital people to communicate, engage and interact with the world,” said Greg said in a the announcement about the new funding round. “We are in a transformational era where brands need to introduce different ways of personalization and ways to deliver unique brand experiences to customers in a very transactional digital world.”

“Soul Machines is truly bringing life to the metaverse with its astonishing humanized AI platform that has the power to enable a digital workforce to be deployed throughout the digital world,” said Murtaza Akbar, Managing Partner at Liberty City Ventures. “We are extremely proud to be working with Greg, Mark and their world-class team to build the future of animated lifelike digital avatars in the metaverse. Their AI can capture and preserve part of the human essence bringing immortality to the digital realm.”

As businesses start to invest in this sector it reminds us that we should all be re-evaluating our strategies towards tackling the future of business, whether the “metaverse” as Zuckerberg imagines it becomes a reality or not.