OriginalVoices, a platform that supplies real-time human opinion data to AI tools and agents, has closed a £1m pre-seed round led by venture capital firm Iona Star, the company announced today.

The start-up said the money will be used to scale its team, expand its network of digital twins, forge additional partnerships and grow its customer base and revenue, with an expanded focus on the US market.

OriginalVoices launched in December 2025. It says it has since built a network of tens of thousands of one-to-one digital twin profiles, each owned by and representing a real person, which AI agents can query on demand or access inside AI tools including ChatGPT and Claude.

How the platform works

The company describes its product as a “human context layer” for AI. Its argument is that AI models know only what they were trained on, not what real people think about specific topics, products, brands and services, and that the result is often generic output.

Rather than relying on synthetic audiences or AI-generated personas, OriginalVoices builds its twins from real people. According to the company, tens of thousands of people use its consumer app, Twineo, to create, train and manage their own digital twin, and remain involved in keeping it up to date.

Iona Star will support the company as it refines its proprietary real-time data to improve AI personalisation and audience targeting, OriginalVoices said.

David Dobrin, co-founder and chief executive of OriginalVoices, said: “Choosing an investment partner isn’t easy, but Iona Star brings a genuine understanding of the space we’re building in and acts as an extension of our team, which we are extremely grateful for.”

He added: “As AI models get more powerful and can generate almost anything instantly, the real context gap is human insight, opinion and feedback: knowing what people think and feel, not just relying on a model guessing or making assumptions from its 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.”

“With Iona Star’s backing, we are ready for our next phase: growing the team, sharpening our product offering, and expanding further into the US,” Dobrin said.

Investor track record in AI data

Iona Star has recently backed AMI Labs, the start-up founded by AI researcher Yann LeCun, and led the funding round in AI training data company Worldmodeldata, according to OriginalVoices.

Kevin McGivern, a partner at Iona Star, said: “Across industries, the limit to AI effectiveness is no longer model capability; it’s the quality of the data feeding it.”

He said: “OriginalVoices stands out by bringing a proprietary, real-time human insight layer to AI workflows that reflects the nuances and realities of human opinion. That’s a structural advantage, and we want to be part of supporting OriginalVoices’ development to improve the future of AI.”

Other recent AI raises include Enginuity’s £500,000 round to commercialise dormant patents. UK start-ups raised a record $17bn in the first half of 2026, although only 16 per cent of large rounds involved domestic investors.

The funding follows a partnership with YouGov to launch a joint product, YouGov Parallax.

The product pairs YouGov’s panel, built over two decades, with OriginalVoices’ twin infrastructure, turning that panel data into living twins that customers can speak with on demand, OriginalVoices said.

YouGov launched Parallax in July, describing it as a research product that combines AI twins with validation from real consumers. According to YouGov, the twins draw on data from more than 30 million panellists, and simulated answers can be checked against rapid surveys of live respondents, with results in as little as 30 minutes.

OriginalVoices described the YouGov tie-up as a major milestone for the business, which is now turning its attention to scaling in the US.

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