companyArtificial Intelligence / TechnologyUnited States

Soul Machines

AI company pioneering human-like Digital People powered by its patented Digital Brain™ technology.

Soul Machines is a deep science and technology company founded in 2016 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. Co-founded by serial tech entrepreneur Greg Cross and Academy Award winner Dr. Mark Sagar, the company is currently led by CEO Julie Kim. It is best known for creating empathetic, autonomous AI Assistants — called Digital People — using its patented Digital Brain™, which simulates layers of human biological systems including sensory, motor, attention/perception, and autonomic nervous systems.

The company's core approach, called Biological AI, trains artificial intelligence based on principles of human biology and neuroscience rather than large datasets. An early prototype called BabyX demonstrated this by simulating dopamine and oxytocin to drive autonomous behavior. Soul Machines Studio, its developer environment, allows enterprises and developers to build and deploy human-like AI agents with customizable appearance, tone, and personality, and supports integration with leading large language models.

Soul Machines serves industries including education, personal finance, health and wellness, retail, and media. It has raised $135M in total funding from investors including Horizons Ventures, Temasek, Salesforce Ventures, and Mercedes-Benz, with its most recent disclosed round being a $70M Series B1 in February 2022. An innovation in humanized, biologically-inspired AI is highly relevant to this company, as it sits at the core of its product and competitive differentiation.

Ideas that could help Soul Machines

HDR Compliance Toolkit for Digital-Human Platforms
A B2B API and policy-template suite that helps companies building AI avatars and digital twins implement post-mortem data governance — automated consent checks, erasure workflows, and trustee notification — before regulators mandate it.
Why it helps: Soul Machines builds photorealistic autonomous digital humans for enterprise clients; an HDR compliance layer would let it offer clients contractual certainty about post-mortem data handling, a growing enterprise procurement requirement.