New Zealand's Soul Machines raises $70m
SoftBank Vision Fund 2 has led a USD 70m round for New Zealand-based Soul Machines, which specialises in creating lifelike digital employees for customer engagement.
It comes as Soul Machines shifts its positioning to emphasise potential metaverse applications. The investment - billed as an extension of a USD 40m Series B round led by Temasek Holdings in 2020 - included participation from Liberty City Ventures, a blockchain specialist that recently joined Vision Fund 2 in backing Hong Kong metaverse The Sandbox.
Cleveland Avenue, a consumer brands-focused investor established by former McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson, and Solasta Ventures, a US division of Korea’s Aju IB Investment, also came in as new investors.
Temasek, Salesforce Ventures, and Horizons Ventures re-upped. Total funding since the company’s inception in 2016 is USD 135m, including a USD 7.5m Series A featuring US-based Iconiq Capital.
Soul Machines was spun out of a University of Auckland program by serial entrepreneur Greg Cross and Mark Sagar, a visual effects expert who has won two Academy Awards for his work in the film industry. The idea is to combine expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), neuroscience, psychology, and art through a “virtual nervous system” that is intelligent, emotive, and adaptive.
The technology, which is supported by biologically inspired models of the human brain and sensory networks, aims to allow corporate clients to create digital ambassadors for their brands and virtual customer service agents. It has collaborated with the likes of Nestle, P&G, the World Health Organization and, the Pan American Health Organization.
With the popularisation of the metaverse, Soul Machines has stressed its ability to create autonomously animated inhabitants of digital worlds. The company said it believes every sector will deploy digital people to represent brands and personalise engagement in these environments.
“Global brands are investing more in how AI can create an intimate, personalized experience with their customers at scale,” Anna Lo, an investment director at SoftBank Advisers, said in a statement.
“With strong R&D capabilities and advanced back-end solutions, we believe that Soul Machines is at the cutting edge for creating digital people that can support companies across functions including customer service, training and entertainment.
The fresh capital will be used for research related to the company’s Digital Brain technology and the development of hyper-realistic digital versions of celebrities, which can be deployed in metaverses. An early example of this work involved a responsive simulation of US musician Will.i.am (pictured).
"Soul Machines is truly bringing life to the metaverse with its astonishing humanised AI platform that has the power to enable a digital workforce to be deployed throughout the digital world,” said Murtaza Akbar, a managing partner at Liberty City, added. “Their AI can capture and preserve part of the human essence, bringing immortality to the digital realm."
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