OriginalVoices, a platform that provides human-generated data and insights for AI systems, has raised £1 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by venture capital firm Iona Star.
OriginalVoices is building a platform that helps AI systems understand people’s opinions, preferences, and reactions. The company aims to address a gap in generative AI, which can produce content but may not always understand what people currently think or feel about specific products, brands, and services.
Instead of using AI-generated personas or synthetic audiences, OriginalVoices uses digital twins connected to real people. Each digital twin is managed by a real person and is designed to represent their views and preferences.
AI agents can interact with these digital twins to gather human insights. The twins can also be accessed through AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude, helping AI systems better understand real human opinions and preferences.
OriginalVoices also runs Twineo, a consumer app that allows people to create, train, and manage their own digital twins.
Since its launch in December 2025, Twineo has built a network of tens of thousands of digital twin profiles.
David Dobrin, co-founder and CEO of OriginalVoices, said “that as AI models become more capable, they still lack direct insight into people’s opinions and feedback, often relying instead on assumptions derived from their training data. That’s what OriginalVoices gives – confidence that AI decisions and outputs are grounded in real human perspective and audience understanding – leading to improved decision-making and outputs.”
OriginalVoices has also partnered with market research and data analytics company YouGov to launch YouGov Parallax.
The new product combines YouGov’s research data with OriginalVoices’ digital twin technology. This allows customers to interact with digital versions based on real participant data.
OriginalVoices will use its new funding to grow its team, improve its real-time data technology, expand its digital twin network, and develop more partnerships.
The company also plans to attract more customers and increase revenue, with a stronger focus on expanding its business in the US market.
