Lemon Slice, a frontier AI research and product lab focused on interactive video, debuted publicly with $10.5 million in seed funding and the launch of Lemon Slice-2. This real-time, “zero-shot” avatar model can turn a single image into a live, conversational video experience.
The company says Lemon Slice-2 enables users to upload one photo—ranging from a corporate headshot to an illustrated character or a painting—and immediately begin a two-way, video-call-style interaction without recording source video, training a custom model, or being constrained to photorealistic faces. Lemon Slice positions the model as a foundational technology designed to be integrated into other products rather than a standalone consumer app.
Lemon Slice-2 is rolling out in two product formats: an API for developers building interactive avatars into applications, and an embeddable website widget that adds a “video chat bubble” with a single line of code. The company is marketing the widget as a visual, conversational support and sales assistant for merchants, aiming to improve engagement, conversions, and customer satisfaction by letting users talk with an on-screen character that can help navigate a site and answer questions.
Under the hood, Lemon Slice says Lemon Slice-2 is built on a proprietary large-scale video diffusion transformer optimized for real-time performance and specialized for talking human interactions. The company claims the system generates video frames from scratch, enabling expressive facial animation, gestures, and broader body movement in a production-ready format, and argues that most competing offerings either require training workflows or exist primarily as demos rather than deployable products.
Lemon Slice also emphasized safety and consent protections, including requirements that users attest they have permission to use submitted photos and voices, along with content moderation and product design that signals clearly to end users that they are interacting with an AI character. The company says it will enforce its policies through bans for misuse.
The seed round was backed by Matrix Partners and Y Combinator, along with a group of high-profile individual investors including Arash Ferdowsi, Emmett Shear, and the music duo The Chainsmokers. Lemon Slice is led by co-founders Lina Colucci (CEO), Sidney Primas, and Andrew Weitz, whom the company describes as PhD-trained researchers with backgrounds spanning institutions including MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Duke. The team currently numbers eight, and the company says the new capital will accelerate product and model development.
KEY QUOTES:
“This is the first time since ChatGPT’s initial launch when I tried a product and thought ‘ah, so this is how people will talk to computers in the future.'”
Jared Friedman, Y Combinator Partner and Managing Director
“The primary complaint about AI avatars is that they lack realism and detract value. Our avatar models are charismatic and fun to interact with. In the future, all video will be interactive and personalized to whoever is watching. We’re building the technology that makes that possible.”
Lina Colucci, Co-Founder and CEO of Lemon Slice
“People connect with faces, not text boxes. Lemon Slice is building charismatic, interactive avatars that give every chatbot a face. It’s the natural evolution of conversational AI.”
Ilya Sukhar, Matrix General Partner
