OriginalVoices, a human data platform for AI, has raised £1 million in pre-seed funding led by Iona Star. Based in London, the platform enables teams and AI agents to instantly understand what real people think and feel about products, brands, services and topics.
As AI models grow more powerful, they generate content at unprecedented scale but know only what they were trained on, not what real people actually think about specific topics, products, brands and services, and the result is often generic AI slop. Rather than using synthetic audiences or LLM personas, OriginalVoices runs a network of 1:1 digital twins, each owned by and representing a real person. Tens of thousands of people already use the consumer app, Twineo, to create, train and manage their digital twin, sharing information about their lives, preferences and views. They stay continuously involved in validating and updating the twin, and can earn money when it contributes to research.
Since launching in December 2025, the network has grown to tens of thousands of 1:1 digital twin profiles, available to query on demand by AI agents or inside leading AI tools including ChatGPT and Claude, reached through the platform, API and MCP integrations. A recent partnership with YouGov to launch a joint product, YouGov Parallax, pairs YouGov's panel, built over two decades, with OriginalVoices' twin infrastructure to turn that data into living twins customers can speak with on demand.
Iona Star brings expertise in cross market data strategy, having recently backed Yann LeCun's startup AMI Labs and led the round in AI training data company Worldmodeldata.
The pre-seed will go towards scaling the current team, expanding the digital twin network, forging additional partnerships and growing the customer base and revenue, with an expanded focus on the US market. Refining the proprietary real-time data to improve AI personalisation and audience targeting also forms part of the next growth phase.
Choosing an investment partner isn't easy, but Iona Star brings a genuine understanding of the space we're building in and acts as an extension of our team, which we are extremely grateful for. As AI models get more powerful and can generate almost anything instantly, the real context gap is human insight, opinion and feedback: knowing what people think and feel, not just relying on a model guessing or making assumptions from its 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. With Iona Star's backing, we are ready for our next phase: growing the team, sharpening our product offering, and expanding further into the US.
Across industries, the limit to AI effectiveness is no longer model capability; it's the quality of the data feeding it. OriginalVoices stands out by bringing a proprietary, real-time human insight layer to AI workflows that reflects the nuances and realities of human opinion. That's a structural advantage, and we want to be part of supporting OriginalVoices' development to improve the future of AI.
