OriginalVoices, a platform that supplies AI systems with human-generated data and insights, has secured £1 million in pre-seed funding. Venture capital firm Iona Star led the round, which will fuel the company's expansion into new markets and product development.
The startup addresses a fundamental limitation in generative AI: while these models have grown increasingly sophisticated, they often lack genuine understanding of what people actually think and feel about specific topics, products, brands and services. OriginalVoices bridges this gap by creating a network of one-to-one digital twins, each anchored to and managed by a real individual. Rather than relying on synthetic audiences or AI-generated personas, these twins can be queried by AI agents or accessed through tools like ChatGPT and Claude.
The company operates Twineo, a consumer application that lets people build, train and oversee their own digital twins. Since its December 2025 launch, the platform has accumulated tens of thousands of digital twin profiles.
David Dobrin, co-founder and CEO, explained the value proposition: "That's what OriginalVoices gives - confidence that AI decisions and outputs are grounded in real human perspective and audience understanding - leading to improved decision-making and outputs," he said. According to Dobrin, as AI models grow more capable, they still lack direct access to people's opinions and feedback, instead drawing on assumptions baked into their training data.
OriginalVoices has also joined forces with YouGov, the market research and data analytics company, to develop YouGov Parallax. This combined offering merges YouGov's panel data with OriginalVoices' digital twin infrastructure, enabling customers to interact with digital representations built on the underlying participant information.
The fresh capital will go toward hiring, advancing its real-time data technology, growing the digital twin network and establishing new partnerships. The company intends to broaden its customer base and revenue streams, with particular emphasis on penetrating the US market.
Source: Tech.eu
