Lemon Slice launches $10.5 million seed round to scale real-time interactive AI avatars

Lemon Slice, a frontier artificial intelligence research and products startup, launched today and announced it has raised $10.5 million in funding.

The funding will be used to scale up the company's real-time interactive avatar technology and accelerate the growing commercial adoption of its application programming interfaces and embedded avatar products.

Founded in 2024 and a graduate of the Y Combinator Winter 2024 batch, Lemon Slice is building the foundational technology for interactive video experiences that respond to users in real-time, rather than passively playing pre-recorded content.

Lemon Slice offers advanced AI video avatar technology that can transform a single still image into a fully interactive conversational video character. The company's flagship model, called Lemon Slice-2, allows users to upload photos such as corporate headshots, cartoons, and paintings, and instantly have a live video call with that character.

What sets Lemon Slice apart from its competitors is that characters are created in real-time, rather than requiring extensive training data, video clips, or imposing strict style restrictions.

The company's technology utilizes a large-scale video diffusion transformer designed to generate every pixel of animation, including facial expressions, gestures, and whole-body movements, on the fly. Lemon Slice claims this technology can deliver expressive and emotionally engaging avatars that feel more natural and interactive than typical static or restricted avatars.

“The main complaint about AI avatars is the lack of realism and the loss of value,” explained co-founder and CEO Lina Colucci. “Our avatar models are charismatic and fun to interact with. In the future, all videos will be interactive and personalized to the person watching. We're building the technology to make that possible.”

Developers can access and use Lemon Slice's technology via an API, allowing website owners to embed interactive avatar widgets with minimal coding effort.

Seed funding was provided by Matrix Partners LP, Y Combinator Management, Dropbox Inc. Chief Technology Officer Arash Ferdowsi, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, and music band The Chainampers.

“People connect with faces, not text boxes,” said Ilya Skahar, general partner at Matrix Partners. “Lemon Slice is building charismatic, interactive avatars that give every chatbot a face. It's a natural evolution of conversational AI.”

Image: lemon slice