ORIGINALVOICES RAISES £1 MILLION IN PRE-SEED FUNDING LED BY IONA STAR

The real-time human insight platform for AI will use the funding to scale its team, expand its digital twin network and grow its presence in the US

Funding follows successful growth momentum and partnerships with established and trusted brands such as YouGov

15th September 2026, London, UK: OriginalVoices, the human data for AI platform that enables teams and AI agents to instantly understand what real people think and feel, has closed a £1 million pre-seed funding round led by venture capital firm Iona Star.

Iona Star will support OriginalVoice’s next growth phase as it refines its proprietary real time data to improve AI personalisation and audience targeting. The fundraise and partnership will provide OriginalVoices with the support and backing needed to scale the current team, expand the digital twin network, forge additional partnerships, grow the customer base and revenue growth - with an expanded focus on the US market.

The venture capital firm brings deep expertise in cross market data strategy, having recently backed Yann LeCun's startup AMI Labs and led the round in AI training data company Worldmodeldata, positioning them as sophisticated investors in the data and AI tooling space.

David Dobrin, Co-Founder and CEO of OriginalVoices, commented: "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. 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."

Kevin McGivern, Partner, Iona Star, commented: "Across industries, the limit to AI effectiveness is no longer model capability; it's the quality of the data feeding it. 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."

OriginalVoices has built the human context layer for AI. As AI models grow more powerful, they generate content at unprecedented scale, but since they only know what they were trained on, not what real people actually think about specific topics, products, brands and services, the result is often generic AI slop. OriginalVoices solves this not with synthetic audiences or LLM personas, but with a network of 1:1 Digital Twins, each owned by and representing a real person. Tens of thousands of people already use OriginalVoices' consumer app, Twineo, to create, train and manage their Digital Twin, staying continuously involved so AI amplifies real people rather than replacing them.

Since launching in December 2025, OriginalVoices has built a network of tens of thousands of 1:1 Digital Twin profiles, available to query on demand by AI agents, or inside leading AI tools including ChatGPT and Claude. The company's recent partnership with YouGov to launch a joint product - YouGov Parallax - also marks a major milestone, pairing YouGov's panel, built over two decades, with OriginalVoices' twin infrastructure to turn that data into living twins customers can speak with on demand.

ENDS

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About OriginalVoices

OriginalVoices is building the human context layer for AI, helping models, teams and AI agents understand what real people think and feel about products, brands, services and topics. Its platform is powered by a network of tens of thousands of digital twins - each owned and trained by the real person it represents.Through its consumer app, Twineo, people create and train an AI version of themselves by sharing information about their lives, preferences and views. They remain involved in validating and updating their twin, and can earn money when it contributes to research. OriginalVoices gives enterprise customers access to this human-grounded data through its platform, API and integrations with AI tools including Claude and ChatGPT via MCP, enabling real audience perspectives to inform decision-making, creative development and AI-powered workflows. It also partners with YouGov to expand the digital twin network internationally. Unlike purely synthetic-data approaches, OriginalVoices is designed to amplify real people rather than replace them.

About Iona Star

Iona Star invests in the data and infrastructure that AI runs on. An early-stage venture capital fund, it backs founders building the foundational layers on which AI businesses are built. Led by partners who have founded, operated, and exited data and technology businesses, Iona Star brings capital and hands-on expertise to every company it backs. For more information, visit ionastar.com.