Soul Machines

Soul Machines is a developer of “digital people”: computer-generated, autonomously animated faces that talk with customers on screens. It was launched in November 2016 as a spin-out of the University of Auckland, built on technology developed at the university’s Auckland Bioengineering Institute, with US$7.5 million of initial funding from Hong Kong’s Horizons Ventures.¹ The company said in February 2022 that it had raised a US$70 million Series B1 round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, bringing its total funding to US$135 million, and listed customers including Nestlé Toll House, P&G, Twitch, the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization.² Its website markets a “Digital Workforce” of human-like AI agents for roles such as customer service and HR benefits.³

Its best-documented role case is at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. With IBM Watson, it built a digital human concierge that DFW tested near gate A-34 in Terminal A; the first phase ended on June 25, 2021.⁴ A second version, Digital Iris, went into Terminal B information kiosks in June 2022. Soul Machines supplied her face, animation and emotion detection, IBM’s Watson Assistant handled the questions, and the company said in October 2022 that she had handled “thousands of conversations” and was designed to augment airport support staff.⁵ The case is covered in AI and robot receptionists, event concierge and guide robots and building concierge robots and AI. In health, the WHO launched Florence, a digital health worker supported by Soul Machines, with a beta of Florence 2.0 reported in October 2022.⁶

NBR reported that receivers from KPMG were appointed to Soul Machines on February 5, 2026, and that buyers were being sought.⁷ MetaRoles found no later statement on the status of its deployments.