OriginalVoices raises £1M pre-seed round led by Iona Star

OriginalVoices, a platform delivering human-generated data and insights for AI systems, has secured £1 million in pre-seed funding from venture capital firm Iona Star. The startup is creating a platform that connects AI systems with real-time information about people's opinions, preferences, and responses. This addresses the gap between generative AI's capabilities and their understanding of human perspectives on topics, products, brands, and services.

Instead of synthetic audiences or AI-generated personas, OriginalVoices employs a network of one-to-one digital twins, each linked to and managed by a real individual. These twins represent users' views and preferences and can be queried by AI agents or accessed via AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude. The company has already established a network of tens of thousands of digital twin profiles since its launch in December 2025.

OriginalVoices' co-founder and CEO, David Dobrin, emphasized that AI models still lack direct insight into people's opinions and feedback, often relying on assumptions from their training data. OriginalVoices aims to provide confidence in AI decisions by grounding outputs in real human perspective and audience understanding, leading to better decision-making.

The company has partnered with market research and data analytics firm YouGov to launch YouGov Parallax, a joint product that merges YouGov's panel data with OriginalVoices' digital twin infrastructure. This allows customers to interact with digital representations based on underlying participant data. With the recent funding, OriginalVoices plans to expand its team, enhance real-time data technology, grow its digital twin network, forge new partnerships, and focus on increasing its customer base and revenue, particularly in the US market.