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Investment
We’re excited to welcome AvatarOS. Founded by Isaac Bratzel, AvatarOS recently closed on a $7 million Seed round led by M13 that includes Andreessen Horowitz Games Fund, HF0, Valia Ventures, and Mento VC. Angel investors include Replit CEO Amjad Masad, and executives from Hugging Face and Brud. The company recently graduated from two incredibly selective programs in their respective fields, the A16Z Speedrun accelerator and HF0's AI residency program, where M13 investor Latif met Isaac.
Why we’re excited about AvatarOS
The global digital avatar market size is poised to reach $270.61 billion by 2030.
Founder Isaac Bratzel designed Amelia 2.0 (9M followers, 1,000 integrations, speaks 100+ languages) and Lil Miquela (8 million followers, 2.4M Instagram followers, 273,000 YouTube subscribers, named Time’s 25 Most Influential People on the Internet in 2018).
Technology, especially artificial intelligence, has enabled the popularity of avatars to grow in the past four years, especially with companies like Meta, Roblox, Snap and Apple making it easier to create and maintain an avatar. Estimates show over 1 billion avatars exist across these platforms.
What if you could have an avatar that was more authentic? That not only looks like you, but moves and acts like you in three-dimensions? That’s what Isaac Bratzel is working on at AvatarOS.
The company is developing interactive AI-powered avatars with three-dimensional characteristics for more real life quality and control for brands in entertainment, gaming, media and sports. For example, for brands to better personally connect with fans and maintain consistent branding as they scale their social media personas.
Characters are trained using AvatarOS’s patented four-dimensional machine-learning technology. This enables the avatar to be more easily integrated into a video game or immersive experience as well as do something simpler, like answer a customer question in a mobile app.
It was Bratzel’s background and that 4D technology that caught the eye of M13 partner Latif Peracha.
Discussions involving investing in Bratzel stemmed from what would these avatars be used for. “We're here to effectively navigate through new use cases and be on the bleeding edge of that,” Peracha said.
The early days of AI with Amelia
Bratzel’s original passion was art, which later evolved into computer graphics and animation once he entered college. He spent the next few years building large-scale animations and media content. That soon turned into three-dimensional characters, animation and VFX (visual effects) projects.
That work ventured into the world of technology and artificial intelligence in 2014 when Bratzel joined a small production studio contracted to build a new version of an avatar studio for IPsoft. IPsoft saw something in Bratzel and brought him on as head of 3D design in 2016.
It was there that Bratzel met Amelia. Isaac and his team were charged with building Amelia 2.0. Amelia was a virtual talent avatar combining real-time expressions and communications with automated customer service.
Amelia went on to have more than 1,000 integrations, 9 million active users and speak more than 100 languages.
“This was the early days of building natural language processing capabilities — the early days of AI, if you will,” Bratzel said. “They were trying to use it to automate any kind of information technology and business. Think car insurance sales to customer service requests — putting a human face on that.”
Amelia’s job was to provide automated problem-solving responses just like a human and to replace slapping some kind of graphic on a website.
Building Amelia was not without its challenges. Bratzel recalls having to stylize the avatar.
“If it’s realistic-ish, but not animated very well, it’s creepy,” he said. “The goal was also to be as real as life, to have more integrations and be faster and lighter. There were artistic and technical challenges, and a lot of connections made from there.”
Bratzel, on the other hand, was ready for something new. He left IPsoft and joined a startup company in Los Angeles. “It was fun at first, but commuting back-and-forth between L.A. and New York got old,” he said.
“Let’s make a virtual human.” Hello Lil Miquela
A short time later, he met Trevor McFedries & Sara Decou, co-founders of software company Brud, and joined the company as chief design and innovation officer.
During his three years at Brud, he helped create and launch the talent avatar Lil Miquela, which went on to amass over 8 million followers across social media and was featured in brand collaborations including with Samsung and Prada. Lil Miquela also became CAA’s first virtual client — the first digital avatar to sign with a talent agency, according to Bratzel.
In 2021, Roham Gharegozlou’s Dapper Labs acquired Brud, and Bratzel went to work there in a new division called Dapper Collectives, which was working on taking DAO (decentralized autonomous organizations) mainstream using blockchain technology.
After one year, Bratzel left to found AvatarOS.
Inside AvatarOS
Like most technology in its early days, building content for Miquela was costly and “not without very real limitations,” Bratzel would ultimately write in a LinkedIn blog. Some of the things Brud wanted to do just weren't practical due to costs, he said. He recalls having to figure out other ways to build larger pieces of content, including through joint efforts with other companies.
“Having worked with Amelia.ai, the dream was always to be able to leverage AI to scale content. A digital avatar could be anywhere and everywhere and speak any language,” Bratzel said.
But he wanted to avoid the “commoditization of content generation,” Bratzel said. He describes it as a race to the bottom. So the company is working to create the opposite: avatars that can speak authentically and are always on brand. That’s because the avatars are trained on authentic data sets rather than scraping the internet, he said.
“We created a technology that allows us to do not just three-dimensional data, but actually four-dimensional,” Bratzel said. “We use what's called volumetric capture to capture real humans in motion at the highest quality. We also created an automated process that takes all of those captured images and meshes them together with a high degree of sophistication, so that now we have consistent points that are moving through space and time. There isn't a bunch of random data like you get with diffusion models.”
AvatarOS’ early targets include sports media and entertainment, where brands often seek brand consistency, Bratzel said. Persistence is another target. The characters will have a personality and a backstory that continues to evolve over time as the character gains a social following and is able to produce more content and interact with the audience.
"We are betting interactive and dynamic content will be the next wave of new media — and authentic characters will drive fan and audience engagement,” Bratzel said.
Read more about Isaac Bratzel
- From Miquela to AvatarOS: The Evolution of Digital Humans in Marketing
- The Next Frontier of AI: Why 3D Avatars Will Revolutionize Human-Computer Interaction
- Isaac on The A16Z’s podcast (Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela)
Follow AvatarOS
Investment
We’re excited to welcome AvatarOS. Founded by Isaac Bratzel, AvatarOS recently closed on a $7 million Seed round led by M13 that includes Andreessen Horowitz Games Fund, HF0, Valia Ventures, and Mento VC. Angel investors include Replit CEO Amjad Masad, and executives from Hugging Face and Brud. The company recently graduated from two incredibly selective programs in their respective fields, the A16Z Speedrun accelerator and HF0's AI residency program, where M13 investor Latif met Isaac.
Why we’re excited about AvatarOS
The global digital avatar market size is poised to reach $270.61 billion by 2030.
Founder Isaac Bratzel designed Amelia 2.0 (9M followers, 1,000 integrations, speaks 100+ languages) and Lil Miquela (8 million followers, 2.4M Instagram followers, 273,000 YouTube subscribers, named Time’s 25 Most Influential People on the Internet in 2018).
Technology, especially artificial intelligence, has enabled the popularity of avatars to grow in the past four years, especially with companies like Meta, Roblox, Snap and Apple making it easier to create and maintain an avatar. Estimates show over 1 billion avatars exist across these platforms.
What if you could have an avatar that was more authentic? That not only looks like you, but moves and acts like you in three-dimensions? That’s what Isaac Bratzel is working on at AvatarOS.
The company is developing interactive AI-powered avatars with three-dimensional characteristics for more real life quality and control for brands in entertainment, gaming, media and sports. For example, for brands to better personally connect with fans and maintain consistent branding as they scale their social media personas.
Characters are trained using AvatarOS’s patented four-dimensional machine-learning technology. This enables the avatar to be more easily integrated into a video game or immersive experience as well as do something simpler, like answer a customer question in a mobile app.
It was Bratzel’s background and that 4D technology that caught the eye of M13 partner Latif Peracha.
Discussions involving investing in Bratzel stemmed from what would these avatars be used for. “We're here to effectively navigate through new use cases and be on the bleeding edge of that,” Peracha said.
The early days of AI with Amelia
Bratzel’s original passion was art, which later evolved into computer graphics and animation once he entered college. He spent the next few years building large-scale animations and media content. That soon turned into three-dimensional characters, animation and VFX (visual effects) projects.
That work ventured into the world of technology and artificial intelligence in 2014 when Bratzel joined a small production studio contracted to build a new version of an avatar studio for IPsoft. IPsoft saw something in Bratzel and brought him on as head of 3D design in 2016.
It was there that Bratzel met Amelia. Isaac and his team were charged with building Amelia 2.0. Amelia was a virtual talent avatar combining real-time expressions and communications with automated customer service.
Amelia went on to have more than 1,000 integrations, 9 million active users and speak more than 100 languages.
“This was the early days of building natural language processing capabilities — the early days of AI, if you will,” Bratzel said. “They were trying to use it to automate any kind of information technology and business. Think car insurance sales to customer service requests — putting a human face on that.”
Amelia’s job was to provide automated problem-solving responses just like a human and to replace slapping some kind of graphic on a website.
Building Amelia was not without its challenges. Bratzel recalls having to stylize the avatar.
“If it’s realistic-ish, but not animated very well, it’s creepy,” he said. “The goal was also to be as real as life, to have more integrations and be faster and lighter. There were artistic and technical challenges, and a lot of connections made from there.”
Bratzel, on the other hand, was ready for something new. He left IPsoft and joined a startup company in Los Angeles. “It was fun at first, but commuting back-and-forth between L.A. and New York got old,” he said.
“Let’s make a virtual human.” Hello Lil Miquela
A short time later, he met Trevor McFedries & Sara Decou, co-founders of software company Brud, and joined the company as chief design and innovation officer.
During his three years at Brud, he helped create and launch the talent avatar Lil Miquela, which went on to amass over 8 million followers across social media and was featured in brand collaborations including with Samsung and Prada. Lil Miquela also became CAA’s first virtual client — the first digital avatar to sign with a talent agency, according to Bratzel.
In 2021, Roham Gharegozlou’s Dapper Labs acquired Brud, and Bratzel went to work there in a new division called Dapper Collectives, which was working on taking DAO (decentralized autonomous organizations) mainstream using blockchain technology.
After one year, Bratzel left to found AvatarOS.
Inside AvatarOS
Like most technology in its early days, building content for Miquela was costly and “not without very real limitations,” Bratzel would ultimately write in a LinkedIn blog. Some of the things Brud wanted to do just weren't practical due to costs, he said. He recalls having to figure out other ways to build larger pieces of content, including through joint efforts with other companies.
“Having worked with Amelia.ai, the dream was always to be able to leverage AI to scale content. A digital avatar could be anywhere and everywhere and speak any language,” Bratzel said.
But he wanted to avoid the “commoditization of content generation,” Bratzel said. He describes it as a race to the bottom. So the company is working to create the opposite: avatars that can speak authentically and are always on brand. That’s because the avatars are trained on authentic data sets rather than scraping the internet, he said.
“We created a technology that allows us to do not just three-dimensional data, but actually four-dimensional,” Bratzel said. “We use what's called volumetric capture to capture real humans in motion at the highest quality. We also created an automated process that takes all of those captured images and meshes them together with a high degree of sophistication, so that now we have consistent points that are moving through space and time. There isn't a bunch of random data like you get with diffusion models.”
AvatarOS’ early targets include sports media and entertainment, where brands often seek brand consistency, Bratzel said. Persistence is another target. The characters will have a personality and a backstory that continues to evolve over time as the character gains a social following and is able to produce more content and interact with the audience.
"We are betting interactive and dynamic content will be the next wave of new media — and authentic characters will drive fan and audience engagement,” Bratzel said.
Read more about Isaac Bratzel
- From Miquela to AvatarOS: The Evolution of Digital Humans in Marketing
- The Next Frontier of AI: Why 3D Avatars Will Revolutionize Human-Computer Interaction
- Isaac on The A16Z’s podcast (Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela)
Follow AvatarOS
Read more
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