New Zealand-based Soul Machines, which uses AI to create customer-facing avatars for businesses, raises a $70M Series B1 led by Vision Fund 2
Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Soul Machines' $40M Series B led by Temasek in early 2020 established it as one of the first movers in customer-facing digital avatars, with Google, Sony, and Mercedes Benz as reference customers. The new $70M Series B1 brings in SoftBank's Vision Fund 2, which has been deploying into applied-AI startups like Peak AI, as a follow-on rather than a fresh lead round.
The raise lands in an increasingly crowded field: Seoul-based Deepbrain AI raised a $44M Series B months earlier, Hour One followed with a $20M Series A, and Synthesia's later trajectory to a $2.1B valuation shows where the category can go. Soul Machines' partnership with Authentic Brands Group on Digital Marilyn points to a second lane beyond enterprise customer service: licensed celebrity likenesses.
First-order effects
- Soul Machines gets roughly $110M of total disclosed funding and a SoftBank backer, giving it more runway than Deepbrain AI or Hour One to scale its avatar platform across existing enterprise customers.
- The Authentic Brands Group partnership becomes a template the new capital can fund: interactive GPT-powered likenesses of owned celebrity estates, unveiled at SXSW, as a distinct product line alongside business avatars.
Second-order effects
- Deepbrain AI, Hour One, and Synthesia face a better-capitalized rival bidding for the same enterprise deployments, pushing the category toward differentiation by vertical and price rather than raw avatar realism.
- IP holders like Authentic Brands Group gain leverage: with multiple funded avatar vendors competing, licensing terms for digital likenesses become a live negotiation rather than a bespoke experiment.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the avatar market bifurcates into enterprise customer-facing platforms and estate-licensed celebrity personas, with brand-rights owners becoming gatekeepers of whose faces AI can wear.
- SoftBank's repeated bets on applied-AI startups signal large funds treating vertical AI applications — not just frontier models — as the investable layer, concentrating late-stage capital among a few named platforms per vertical.
The trend: Customer-facing AI avatars are consolidating into a funded category that spans enterprise service automation and licensed celebrity likenesses, with late-stage capital picking regional winners.