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

OriginalVoices, a platform providing human-generated data and insights for AI systems, has raised £1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by venture capital firm Iona Star.

OriginalVoices is developing a platform designed to give AI systems and agents access to information about people's opinions, preferences and responses. The company is targeting a gap between the capabilities of generative AI models and their ability to understand what people currently think and feel about specific topics, products, brands and services.

Rather than relying on synthetic audiences or AI-generated personas, OriginalVoices uses a network of one-to-one digital twins, each linked to and managed by a real person. The twins are designed to represent individuals' views and preferences and can be queried by AI agents or accessed through AI tools including ChatGPT and Claude.

OriginalVoices also operates Twineo, a consumer app through which people can create, train and manage their digital twins. Since launching in December 2025, the company 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,

Dobrin said.

The company has also partnered with market research and data analytics company YouGov to launch YouGov Parallax. The joint product combines YouGov's panel data with OriginalVoices' digital twin infrastructure, allowing customers to interact with digital representations based on the underlying participant data.

OriginalVoices will use the funding to expand its team, further develop its real-time data technology, grow its digital twin network and build additional partnerships. It also plans to expand its customer base and revenue, with an increased focus on the US market.