Beyond Presence, a Munich-based company shaping the future of AI-powered conversational avatars, raised $3.1M in pre-seed funding. The round was led by HV Capital, one of Europe’s leading venture capital firms, with participation from 10xFounders, Alba VC and several prominent Business Angel investors, including founders and executives from Meta, DeepMind, and Zalando.
Founded by experienced team who exited their previous video to 3D human Generative AI company to Meta, Beyond Presence aims to expand its AI-powered real-time avatars, continue building its proprietary foundation model for hyper-personalization, and revolutionize industries like sales and customer service, coaching, e-commerce or education by providing more immersive, human-like digital interactions.
Beyond Presence’s platform enables businesses of any size and industry to create conversational avatars capable of delivering human-like responses. The technology is set to unlock news ways of engagement for a wide range of industries at scale.
Munich, October 14, 2024 — Beyond Presence, building real-time, AI-powered conversational avatars, today announced that it has raised $3.1M in pre-seed funding led by HV Capital, with participation from 10x Founders, Alba VC, Buildery VC, and key Business Angel investors, including executives from Meta, Deel, DeepMind, and Zalando. The funding will fuel the development of Beyond Presence’s best-in-class foundational models for conversational avatars and help the company scale its technology across sectors like sales and customer service, education, recruiting or e-commerce transforming the way businesses engage with their audiences.
Beyond Presence’s technology enables the creation of hyper-realistic avatars capable of real-time multimodal video interaction and intelligent body control while engaging in human-like face-to-face conversations. Unlike other AI tools, which focus on one-way interactions, Beyond Presence offers interactive and dynamic experiences. This allows businesses across verticals and sizes to deliver personalized engagements, such as virtual shopping assistants or AI-driven customer support, that feel like interacting with a human.
“We are rethinking the way humans interact with technology,” said Awais Shafique, CEO and co-founder of Beyond Presence. “Our goal is to build emotionally resonant experiences that allow businesses to scale human-like interactions in ways that are not possible with conventional automation. We’re creating an extension of yourself for one of the most time-consuming tasks—meetings. Today, we can scale compute, but there is no easy way to scale humanness.” As remote work and virtual services become the norm, the demand for personalized digital interactions is growing.
Beyond Presence offers a self-serve platform where businesses can easily create and deploy scalable, AI-powered avatars that integrate seamlessly into their digital infrastructure. With support for multiple languages, these avatars can handle tasks like personalized customer interactions, educational content delivery, employee training or automated customer service. Developers can also leverage the platform’s APIs to customize avatars for specific use cases, enabling real-time, human-like interactions that go beyond what existing AI video generation tools offer—delivering more natural body language, facial expressions, and low-latency conversations.
"In today’s video-driven world, whether for SMEs or Fortune 500 companies, businesses across industries seek to engage their audiences through rich, immersive content that feels authentic and natural. However, the high costs, complexity, and AI-related compliance concerns of existing technologies often stand in the way. We're thrilled to support Awais, Felix, and the Beyond Presence team as they push the boundaries of human-like digital interactions through strong focus on cutting-edge technology and research, hiring top industry talent and responsible AI development.” - Zuzanna Czapinska, Investment Manager at HV Capital
The recent funding will accelerate Beyond Presence’s product development and market expansion, bringing its technology to a broader range of industries.