Lemon Slice will raise $10.5M from YC and Matrix to develop its digital avatar technology

Developers and companies are increasingly deploying AI assistants and chatbots within their apps, but so far they’ve only been texting. Digital avatar company The Lemon Region is working to add a video component to chat with a new widespread model that can create digital avatars from a single photo.

Called Lemon Slice-2, the model can create a digital avatar that works on top of knowledge to perform any task required of an AI assistant, such as answering customer questions, helping with household inquiries, or even working as a health care provider.

“In the early days of GenAI, my colleagues started playing around with different videos, and it became clear to us that video would be interactive. The compelling part of tools like ChatGPT is that they were interactive, and we want video to have that layer,” said Lina Colucci.

Lemon Slice says this is a 20-billion-parameter model that can run on a single GPU to render video at 20 frames per second. The company is developing the model through an API and a custom widget that companies can integrate into their sites with a single line of code. Once the avatar is created, you can change the background, style, and appearance of the character at any time.

Apart from humanoid avatars, the company is also looking at being able to create non-human avatars to suit different needs. Developers are using ElevenLabs technology to create voices for these avatars.

Founded by Lina Colucci, Sidney Primas, and Andrew Weitz in 2024, Lemon Slice is betting that using its hybrid model (a type of model that learns to work backwards from noisy studies to generate new data) in creating avatars will differentiate it from its competitors.

“The existing avatar solutions I’ve seen so far are adding value to the product,” Colucci said. They look good for a few seconds, and when you start interacting with them, they feel weird, and it doesn’t make you feel comfortable.

To support the project, the company on Tuesday said it has received $10.5 million in funding from Matrix Partners, Y Combinator, Dropbox CTO Arash Ferdowsi, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, and The Chainsmokers.

The company says it has security tools in place to prevent unauthorized facial or voice activity, and that it uses strong language controls to control its content.

Lemon Slice wouldn’t name the organizations that use its technology, but said the model is being used in education, language learning, e-commerce, and corporate training.

The startup faces stiff competition from video production startups like D-ID, HeyGen, and Synthesia, as well as other digital avatar makers. GeniesLife Machine, Practiceand AvatarOS.

Ilya Sukhar, a partner at Matrix, thinks that avatars will be useful in places where videos are popular. For example, people prefer to learn on YouTube rather than reading long texts. He added that Lemon Slice’s innovative technology is what gives it the ability to go beyond other startups.

“It’s a technology group with a history of delivering ML products, not just demos and research. Many other players are interested in specific applications, and Lemon Slice is taking part in all of that. “horror lessons” an additive approach (of data and computation) that has worked in other AI methods,” he said.

Y Combinator’s Jared Friedman believes that using a hybrid interface allows Lemon Slice to create avatars of any kind compared to other startups that focus more on avatars like people or games.

“Lemon Slice is, I believe, the only company taking a critical approach to ML that can overcome the magic valley and break the avatar Turing test.” They teach the same type of model as Veo3 or Sora: a video transmission transformer. it only takes a picture to add a new face,” he said.

The startup currently has eight employees, and plans to use the money to fund engineering and marketing efforts, as well as pay for auditors to train its models.