Tel Aviv-based startup which established in 2019 has raised $5 million seed to turn real people to synthetic characters. Hour One develops a system driven by AI to create a synthetic personality version of people’s real selves, that can say whatever comes to mind.
Hour One Seed round led by Galaxy EOS VC Fund. Kindred Ventures, Remagine Ventures, and Amaranthine.
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It is long known that one-day humans will be replaced by real-people-like figures, where it would be impossible to tell between AI-driven figures and human. The book “deep fakes” takes you deep into this subject.
How does it work? After scanning a photo, you can decide what this character will do now. For example, it allows you to immediately create videos with the new character who like a real human can talk about anything. From just chatting, speak about company product, up to the point of infinite scale.
Instead of creating a new character, you may choose from over 100 pre-made digital characters that come with the system.
Hour One will use the funds to scale its AI-driven cloud platform, onboard “thousands” of new characters, and expand its commercial activities.
The company is currently working with e-commerce, education, automotive, communication, and enterprise sectors, with expanded industry applications expected throughout 2020.
Oren Aharon, Hour One’s CEO, said in a statement: “We believe that synthetic characters of real people will become a part of our everyday life. Our vision is that Hour One will drive the use of synthetic characters to improve the quality of communication between businesses and people across markets and use cases. By enabling each person to create their own character together with our scalable cloud platform, we will provide a variety of solutions for next-gen remote business-to-human interactions.”
Founded in 2019 by CEO Oren Aharon and CTO Lior Hakim, Hour One employs a team of 10 people.