AvatarOS has closed a $7 million seed funding round led by M13 with participation from Andreessen Horowitz Games Fund and other investors to develop AI-powered avatars with personalized traits and lifelike movements.

Isaac Bratzel, creator of popular virtual influencers Lil Miquela and Amelia 2.0, founded AvatarOS after leaving Dapper Labs in 2022. The company focuses on creating high-end avatars in 3D space that move authentically rather than generically.

“One obvious parallel is spam emails. When it is easy to create content, it proliferates everywhere, and you want to have that differentiation from the saturation of content. That’s where we want to be in the avatar space,” Bratzel told TechCrunch.

During due diligence, M13 partner Latif Peracha spoke with an avatar of Bratzel to learn more about the founder. “We believe that unlocking volumetric capture and 4D is going to open up a whole new set of behaviors and engagement between artists, creators and their communities that we can’t actually predict today,” Peracha stated in a M13 blog post.

Four-Dimensional Technology

AvatarOS differentiates itself through its patented four-dimensional machine-learning technology. The company uses volumetric capture to record real humans in motion at high quality, then applies an automated process to mesh the captured images.

“We created a technology that allows us to do not just three-dimensional data, but actually four-dimensional,” Bratzel said in M13’s blog post. “We use what’s called volumetric capture to capture real humans in motion at the highest quality.”

According to Bratzel, this approach creates consistent points moving through space and time, avoiding the random data often produced by diffusion models. The company is developing a machine learning-based deformer responsible for creating lifelike movements in avatars.

“The main thing that is important to us is that humans move in a unique way. Pretty much every avatar solution can create something that might look like you but moves generically. Our view is that humans don’t move in the same way, and we want to recreate that,” Bratzel noted.

Market Growth and Business Development

The global digital avatar market is projected to reach $270.61 billion by 2030, with over 1 billion avatars existing across platforms like Meta, Roblox, Snap, and Apple. AvatarOS is currently onboarding beta users and providing them access to existing avatars.

The startup has released a simple API that clients can use to integrate avatars with their websites. Organizations can power these avatars with large language models to provide information and adjust camera angles and views.

While AvatarOS currently creates premium and customized avatars for clients, it plans to provide more creation and adjustment tools in the future. The company targets sports media and entertainment brands seeking consistency in their digital presence.

AvatarOS graduated from two selective programs: the A16Z Speedrun accelerator and HF0’s AI residency program. Angel investors in the company include Replit CEO Amjad Masad and executives from Hugging Face and Brud.

The funding will be used to grow the AvatarOS team and build out its machine learning-based technology for creating lifelike movements in avatars.

“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 concluded.