$3.1M Raised by AI Video Clone Beyond Presence
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Beyond Presence, an AI company has just raised $3.5 million. This is a really fascinating company. If you go to their website, they say you can effortlessly create a hyper-realistic digital clone and send it to video calls on your behalf. There's a lot of interesting things going on in the podcast today. I'm going to talk about exactly what they're doing, how they're able to raise $3.5 million. This is a wait list. They're not even launched yet.

Um, and they were able to raise this much money. Why, what they've done in the past and what they're going to be doing in the future. I think this is a fascinating product that we are going to see a lot more of in the future. So how are they able to do this before I do that? I wanted to say, if you're interested in making money with AI tools, using the AI tools like beyond presence or other ones to make money growing and scaling your business, or as a side hustle, I would love for you to join the AI hustle school community. This is a community of over 185 people. Um,

that every single week I create exclusive pieces of content I don't share anywhere else, breaking down exactly how I'm making money, what AI tools I'm using to scale my businesses. So this is an amazing place. I would love for you to join the community. It's $19 a month. I'm going to bump the price to about $100 a month, but for now it's $19 a month. And if you get it now, you can lock in the price and we'll never raise it on you. So if that sounds interesting, you can check it out. I'll put a link in the description to the AI Hustle School community. So

So back to AI presence and what they're actually doing, right? On their website, they say it's the future of human interaction. So let's talk about it. The reason why they're able to get $3.1 million to build these lifelike avatars is because their founder has actually sold his last startup to Meta. And he's got a bunch of kind of like lore and background to him. So this is a really big...

Obviously space right now, computer vision is really big. Essentially what his company's doing is creating a lifelike avatar of yourself, a clone of yourself that can talk and it's a video. Now, what is it actually powered on? So this is actually going to be powered on chat GPT as the talking component. So when it's you talking, it's going to be, uh,

chat GPT. And the voice for this is actually going to be 11 lab. So this is really interesting to me that it's not like this is a hundred percent homegrown. And I was starting to get concerned that they were just using APIs for everything, but it sounds like they actually are building their own AI model that does the video elements. They have their own AI model. That's, you know, a proprietary doing they've trained in their own AI model. That's going to do the video element. And then they're using open AI

to do talking and response, which is impressive because opening eyes just come out with a bunch of new really fast voice features, features that are impressive. And so, but they won't be using any of those. They're just going to be using the like actual text, the content element from it. And then 11 labs, which can actually clone your voice is what they'll be using. So it's a, it's an interesting combination here. Now,

Why were they able to do this? What's their background? Because they currently have over 300 companies that are on the wait list for their product, which is congratulations to the team. And they got this money from a German firm, which is HV Capital, that led the round, 10X Founders, Alba VC, and some people at Meta, DeepMind, that also kind of jumped in on this whole thing. So

Before they actually did this, the co-founders, Awos Shafir, he was actually on Shark Tank, or it's essentially the German version, which is Dragon's Den. And they did this back in 2020, so four years ago. And they raised what at the time was a record-breaking 650,000 euros to pursue their last company. And their last company was called PreSize. Essentially, this was a computer vision company that could take data

a person's measurements by just recording a video of the user turning around once in front of the camera. So you turn around once in front of the camera, it's going to tell you your measurements. Those measurements could then be used to help you buy clothes online, right? And actually try on clothes. There's a ton of applications you can imagine, and specifically a ton of applications that I think

would be interested in for VR. And so ultimately, this was the case. Whoever invested did a great job. This is a Munich-based startup. But guess who came knocking? Meta came knocking and they acquired PreSize. Now, the price and even the exact date of the transaction was never actually disclosed

But we did some sleuthing. We've done some sleuthing and we have some pretty good speculations on what that might be for. Now, it's kind of interesting. Honestly, this is kind of a common thing where they don't announce how much money was sold for. They don't announce when it was sold. I have some friends that raised over $3 million from essentially Salesforce or a subsidiary of Salesforce. And

I did a podcast interview with them talking about it. And, uh, they kept telling me like they couldn't announce it until some big Salesforce event. And I had to wait like, I think nine months to post that episode. So sometimes these bigger companies, they really kind of lock down when this stuff actually comes out. But according to SEC filings, Meta said that they spent about $777 million between January and March of 2022. Um,

And they said they spent about $1.5 billion in the first six months of 2022 on acquisitions. So PreSize was the only deal that they publicly disclosed at the time. Wikipedia says that Meta acquired them for about $100 million. Some people, TechCrunch was doing some sleuthing and some people told TechCrunch that the deal was in the lower nine figures. But in any case, obviously a ton of money for these guys. And if you ask...

you know, especially for the fact that they've only raised a couple million dollars. But Shafiq said in an interview, quote, it's lucrative enough that we don't have to work. So they made enough money that they don't technically have to work, but they are all still working. And this is the new...

thorny problem that they are solving. So I think this is a really interesting, uh, a really interesting space. You have other players that are currently, um, in this space, you have hyper ready player meet. These are by Amazon and a 16 Z. And these are more in like the video gaming space. Uh, you have synthesia that can make like full on likenesses of people, but you got to go to actual studio for that. So that's kind of a, you know, out the window. And I think they're working on some, some players, but you also have things like, Hey Jen, that can also do, uh,

a lifelike clone of you. So there's other players doing this. I'm curious to see when beyond presence actually comes out and if we can actually see how good the quality is from their demo on their website. Obviously, it looks like it's like a perfect video pretty much. But I'd be curious to see, you know, how this continues.

They are, you know, people supported by, which I think means people that have invested in them on their website. It's saying Microsoft, Meta, DeepMind, 10X Founders, Deal, Plug and Play. And it's not necessarily these companies, but people from these companies are either investing, I think, or wanting to use them maybe on their wait list. So.

It's going to be impressive when talking about how it works. You essentially create or choose an avatar. You can customize your agent. So that means the language or any custom knowledge you want it to have. And then you can share or embed this. So you actually get a link for your conversational agent that you can embed places and share places. And then afterwards, you can go and actually analyze the conversations that this thing is happening. You can get some actionable items and you can find common themes.

All of this is really fascinating. They say they have safety at their core. I'm excited for this company and I'll definitely keep you up to date on how this rolls out in the future and what other things they're actually able to accomplish. But overall, a fascinating company and I'm super excited to see where Beyond Presence goes in the future.