ANZ's virtual assistant named Jamie was developed by Soul Machines.
Auckland startup Soul Machines has closed another huge capital raise as Mark Zuckerberg's "metaverse" hype and AI boom help to stoke demand for its AI-powered avatars.
The firm says a Series B round led by Japan's SoftBank brought in US$70 million (NZ$104m) - bringing its total funds raised to dateto US$135m.
Soul Machines was co-founded in 2016 by tech entrepreneurs Greg Cross and Academy Award winning Weta Digital alumnus Mark Sagar.
The company has created AI-powered virtual humans used for customer service, such as Air NZ's "Sophie", ANZ's "Jamie" and Mercedes-Benz's "Sarah".
Other clients include Nestle, Amazon-owned Twitch and the World Health Organisation. In December, Soul Machines signed a five-year partnership deal with Microsoft.
Soul Machines currently has around 200 staff between Auckland and an R&D centre in Phoenix, Arizona. Cross says the new funds will be used to hire between 100 and 150 more. The new roles will be "mainly offshore", Cross says.
The US$70m round just closed also included participation from three US venture capital firms: Cleveland Avenue, Liberty City Ventures and Solasta Ventures.
They joined existing investors including Salesforce, Singapore's Tamasek, Mercedes-Benz and Auckland University's commercialisation arm, Uniservices (like another Cross startup - wireless charging pioneer PowerbyProxi, sold to Apple in 2017 in a $100m-plus deal - Soul Machines was born out of research at Auckland University).
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told investors that his latest obsession was building a "metaverse" — a nebulous and much-hyped concept denoting an immersive virtual world filled with avatars.
His company - recently renamed Meta - has assigned 10,000 engineers and billions of dollars to create the metaverse, and recently launched its first 3D avatar-based app for US users to trial.
"Aria", an artificial intelligence-powered avatar created by Soul Machines.
Soul Machines believes every sector will deploy digital people as a digital workforce to represent themselves and their brands in the metaverse, Cross says.
"Soul Machines is truly bringing life to the metaverse with its astonishing humanised AI platform that has the power to enable a digital workforce to be deployed throughout the digital world," Murtaza Akbar, managing partner at Liberty City Ventures, said in a statement.
"We are extremely proud to be working with Greg, Mark and their world-class team to build the future of animated lifelike digital avatars in the metaverse. Their AI can capture and preserve part of the human essence bringing immortality to the digital realm."
