Tavus has raised $40 million in Series B funding to advance the field of human computing, led by CRV with participation from Scale Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, HubSpot Ventures, and Flex Capital. The funding supports Tavus’s mission to create emotionally intelligent AI humans known as PALs, capable of perceiving, reasoning, and interacting like people.
The San Francisco-based AI company is introducing PALs—Personal Affective Links—as agentic AI humans that can see, hear, evolve, and act autonomously. Built on Tavus’s proprietary foundational models for rendering, conversational intelligence, and perception, PALs represent what the company calls the next frontier of computing: AI that not only communicates naturally but understands emotion, context, and social nuance.
Unlike conventional AI chatbots, PALs maintain a lifelike presence, capable of recognizing facial expressions, gestures, and emotional cues in real-time. They remember context, interpret subtle social signals, and switch seamlessly between video, voice, and text. Beyond conversational ability, they possess agency—initiating actions, sending messages, managing schedules, and completing tasks independently. Tavus envisions PALs as AI companions that bridge the gap between human intuition and computational intelligence.
At the core of Tavus’s human computing platform are three foundational models that simulate human behavior with unprecedented fidelity. Phoenix-4 is a state-of-the-art rendering model enabling lifelike facial expressions and emotion generation at conversational latency. Sparrow-1, Tavus’s audio understanding model, leverages deep conversational and emotional comprehension to dynamically interpret tone, timing, and intent. Raven-1, the company’s contextual perception model, grants PALs situational awareness by interpreting people, environments, and gestures to emulate genuine human presence. Combined with Tavus’s proprietary orchestration and memory systems, these models allow AI to engage in fluid, emotionally resonant interaction.
Tavus’s research team includes leading experts from the fields of affective computing, rendering, and perception, including Professor Ioannis Patras and Dr. Maja Pantic. The company’s technologies are already being used by more than 100,000 developers and enterprises across various sectors, including recruiting, sales, education, and customer service.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’ve spent decades forcing humans to learn to speak the language of machines. With PALs, we’re finally teaching machines to think like humans—to see, hear, respond, and look like we do. To understand emotion, context, and all the messy, beautiful stuff that makes us who we are. It’s not about more intelligent AI, it’s about AI that actually meets you where you are.”
“With PALs, we’re finally teaching machines to think like humans—to see, hear, respond, and look like we do. To understand emotion, context, and all the messy, beautiful stuff that makes us who we are.”
Hassaan Raza, CEO of Tavus
