Quinn Favret

By his own account he was born and raised in MichiganMichiganMichigan is a state of the United States nearly surrounded by the Great Lakes and made up of the Upper and Lower peninsulas; its capital is Lansing and its largest city is Detroit. It was admitted to the Union on January 26, 1837, as the 26th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 10,077,331.Open the full entry; he is a native of Troy and graduated from Troy High School in 2018.⁠[1][2][3]

In two podcasts he has described his family background: his grandparents immigrated from Armenia to Michigan during the genocide, and on The AI Report he added that they came over working two factory jobs, did not speak the language, and did their best to bring up his parents and help them live good lives.⁠[1][2]

On his parents, he said on the podcast AI’ve Got Questions that his father did not go to college and that his mother was an accountant; on The AI Report he said, “My parents didn’t go to college,” and “They sent me to college for the first time.”⁠[1][2]

On The AI Report he said that he grew up with a desire to make the world a better place and to bring the vision of his grandparents and parents to life.⁠[2]

He recalled on AI’ve Got Questions that as a child he liked building things, from robotics in the garage to treehouses in the woods.⁠[1]

He spent two years at the University of MichiganUniversity of MichiganThe University of Michigan is a university founded in Detroit in 1817 that moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1837; it is governed by a statewide-elected Board of Regents and also has campuses in Dearborn and Flint.Open the full entry before leaving to start a company; he recalled that at the time he did not know whether the absence would be temporary or permanent.⁠[3]

He said that while he was at Michigan he started working on his first company “almost by accident.” On AI’ve Got Questions he described it as a demand-forecasting tool for a campus restaurant that predicted burger sales from factors such as the weather, traffic and the campus calendar, and he said that the company was later sold.⁠[3][1]

His two accounts of politics and leaving college differ in order: on AI’ve Got Questions he said that for a while he had thought politics was the way to make change, that he started working on Capitol Hill early on, doing policy work, that he came to realize his idealistic view of politics did not match reality, and that he then went to college, rediscovered his love for building, this time through technology, and ended up dropping out of college and going all-in; on The AI Report he said that he dropped out two years after starting college, “went into politics for a little while,” and “stumbled into tech.” On The AI Report he also said that he had kept asking where he could make the biggest impact on the world and that it turned out not to be politics but, it seemed, startups.⁠[1][2]

His founder page on the Y Combinator website lists Chime under “Previously at” and the University of Michigan under “Alumnus of.”⁠[4]

He co-founded the AI video company Tavus with Hassaan Raza, who became its chief executive. A TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry article of March 2023 gives 2020 as the year and San Francisco as the place of the company’s founding, while Y Combinator’s company page lists 2021 as the year Tavus was founded.⁠[5][6]

He recalled connecting with his current co-founder, who was then at GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry; on AI’ve Got Questions he called his co-founder a close friend and said that after the sale of his first company the two of them started talking about how people communicate with machines, and on The AI Report he said that they had “known each other forever.”⁠[3][1][2]

Stephanie ZhanStephanie ZhanStephanie Zhan is an early-stage investing partner at Sequoia Capital who focuses on artificial intelligence, developer tools, and related technology companies. She graduated from Stanford University in computer science, joined Sequoia in 2015, took part in early investments in companies including Linear, Middesk, Rec Room, and Tavus, and serves on the boards of companies including Linear, Reflection, Ricursive Intelligence, and Skild.Open the full entry writes in an article on the Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry website that he and Hassaan Raza, while working at an earlier company, had tried sending customers personalized videos addressing each customer’s specific needs, which earned higher click-through and response rates than mass content; the two recorded hundreds of clips in overnight sessions and concluded that professionals needed a tool for making personalized videos without recording each one by hand, the idea that became Tavus.⁠[7]

In February 2023 he said that Tavus had started about two and a half years earlier; after starting the company he eventually worked in Austin, TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry, and New York City.⁠[3]

Tavus went through the Summer 2021 batch of Y Combinator and raised a small amount of money through the program in 2021.⁠[6][5]

Stephanie Zhan writes that she first tried the product, then still in alpha, in late 2021, on the night after meeting Hassaan Raza and him; she calls the two of them “a special pair, with vision, grit, customer obsession, and a creative lens through which to redefine the way sales and marketing should be.”⁠[7]

On February 8, 2023, the Thiel Foundation announced the 20 members of the new class of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry; he was fifteenth on the list, with Austin, Texas, and New York City given beside his name and Tavus as his project. The announcement describes Tavus as using AI to programmatically generate personalized videos of a person, with that person’s voice and face, at scale. It states that the Thiel Fellowship, launched in 2011, encourages talented young people with big ideas to start companies instead of attending college; during the two-year program fellows receive $100,000 and mentorship from the Thiel Foundation’s network of technology founders, investors and scientists, and the only requirement is that they pause their college enrollment and focus exclusively on building their technology or company; the new class joined 251 previous fellows, and more than a third of that year’s applicants had never applied to college.⁠[8]

He said that he was “over the moon” when he found out that he had been named a fellow. He said that the Thiel Fellowship “has been on my radar for some time,” that it had highlighted founders of some great companies, and that when he dropped out of college it seemed natural to connect with it, since its primary requirement is to drop out of college and start something new. He applied because he thought its mission perfectly matched who he was and what he was trying to do. Thiel Fellowship officials said that Tavus exemplifies the sort of project they try to support; Alex Handy, the director of the Thiel Fellowship, said that young founders with radical ideas know universities will only hold them back, “This is precisely why Quinn is following his own path,” and that he uses AI in ways once limited to science fiction.⁠[3]

He described Tavus as “a platform that creates realistic videos of you without you having to say a word,” and said that the team wanted to solve the problem of “impersonal communication”: a single video can be modified into many versions, each addressing a different person.⁠[3]

He said that what makes Tavus successful is that it fills a business need “no one else was trying to address” and gets things done quickly; that the company had raised capital from “some of the greatest firms in the world” and had been invited to a program at the business school of Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry; and that Tavus was aiming to be a “unicorn company,” a startup valued at over $1 billion, and to “revolutionize brand outreach.”⁠[3]

Tavus’s $6.1 million seed round was made public on March 20, 2023: it was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Accel PartnersAccelAccel is a venture capital firm co-founded in 1983 by Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz. It invests through regional teams and early-stage, growth and late-stage funds, with operations in the United States, Europe, Israel and India. Its investment history includes Facebook, Flipkart, Atlassian, Slack and other technology businesses. Fundraising totals, regulatory assets under management and portfolio-company transaction values are distinct measures.Open the full entry, Index VenturesIndex VenturesIndex Ventures is a venture capital firm founded in Geneva in 1996. It invests from seed through growth and operates across London, San Francisco and New York, supporting technology companies through a transatlantic network.Open the full entry, Lightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture Partners backs companies from seed through late-stage financing. Its website distinguishes Lightspeed Management Company (LSVP) from Lightspeed India Partners (LSIP): the two are separately operated investment advisers, with the U.S., European, and Israeli offices belonging to LSVP and the India and Southeast Asia offices belonging to LSIP.Open the full entry, YC Continuity, SV AngelSV AngelSV Angel is a San Francisco venture capital firm cofounded in 2009 by angel investor Ron Conway and former Google executive David Lee. It typically writes small follow-on checks in seed rounds and has invested in companies such as Airbnb, Pinterest, and Dropbox; in 2018 it said it would no longer raise new funds from outside investors, and from 2022 it set up growth funds.Open the full entry, Hack VC, Remus Capital, Mantis Capital, Liquid2 Ventures, Zillionize, Soma Capital, GTMfund, Terra Nova and several undisclosed angel investors. On the same day Sequoia Capital published an article by Stephanie Zhan on its website stating that it had led the seed round.⁠[5][7]

At the time, users recorded a training video of about 15 minutes from a Tavus script, then recorded a template for each campaign, set variables such as a company or executive name in a web editor, and could use ChatGPTChatGPTChatGPT is a generative AI assistant launched by OpenAI on November 30, 2022. Through websites and applications, it provides conversation, writing, coding, search, file analysis, and image and voice interaction. It evolved from a free research preview into personal, enterprise and education plans, gradually adding deep research, Study mode and cross-application task execution. Its use has prompted continuing discussions about factual accuracy, personal privacy, copyright, education and teen safety.Open the full entry to generate personalized introductions; the system used machine learning to model facial gestures and lip movements and synced them to synthesized audio. About half of users worked through a web dashboard, the rest through the API or native integrations. Users were mainly sales and marketing teams but also included recruiters, university deans and C-level executives; customers named in the article were CoStar and AB Tasty; a basic plan for smaller businesses cost $275 a month, with limits such as the number of videos, while a business plan was custom-priced with no advertised price.⁠[5]

In the article he stressed that “There’s a common misconception that Tavus only works with sales and marketing teams”; he said that typically the user clones themselves, though businesses sometimes use a central figure, and that Tavus lets all types of users clone themselves in minutes. He said that because users must pass voice verification and record live, “users cannot upload videos of others talking,” that users have all rights to their data and likeness and can delete their videos at any time, and that pricing was customized and usage-based, by number of seats and videos generated. He also said that many power users apply Tavus broadly across their organizations, including for customer success, product, recruiting and other go-to-market functions, that sales teams often use the platform directly to create large batches of videos while other teams integrate it programmatically, and that Tavus screens each use case before a user starts, to ensure that it meets its community guidelines and is ethical. Such integrations allow event-driven workflows, in which a video is generated and sent after a trigger such as a form submission on a company website.⁠[5]

On March 12, 2024, TechCrunch published news that Tavus had raised an $18 million Series A; the alt text of the founders’ photo in the article identifies him as one of Tavus’s founders and its chief operating officer (COO). The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator and HubSpot participating; the article calls Tavus a four-year-old generative AI startup.⁠[9]

Besides a SaaS app for building AI video templates, Tavus then offered a replica API, which uses its own Phoenix model, based on neural radiance fields, to build a 3D model from 2D video with about two minutes of training data and produce photorealistic digital replicas, as well as a lip-sync API, a dubbing API with multilanguage voice cloning and a video campaign API; SalesforceSalesforceSalesforce is a U.S. enterprise software company headquartered in San Francisco, providing cloud applications, data platforms and AI agent tools centered on customer relationship management (CRM).Open the full entry and MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry used it to upsell to their business customers through personalized demo videos. Users submit a verbal consent statement that is matched against their training audio and then checked automatically and by human reviewers, and API customers go through the same verification.⁠[9]

On July 22, 2025, Season 1, Episode 9 of the podcast AI’ve Got Questions, hosted by Stacey Epstein, featured him as its guest in an episode of about 22 minutes. The episode introduces him as Tavus’s chief operating officer and co-founder and covers Tavus’s platform for lifelike digital humans that hold real-time conversations, its uses in healthcare, education, recruiting and go-to-market work, and how it differs from chatbots and AI sales-development tools.⁠[1]

He said in the episode that the team had spent the last four or five years building what it calls an “operating system for human-AI interaction”; that Tavus does not build application layers such as an AI SDR but white-labels its APIs so that others can build on top; that its customers range from 10-person startups to AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry and AlibabaAlibabaAlibaba is a technology group focused on commerce, cloud computing, and AI. Founded in 1999 by 18 people led by Jack Ma, it received a major investment from Yahoo in 2005.Open the full entry, though the company knows it needs to make Tavus easier to use; and that internally, whenever the company needs to hire or launch something new, it asks whether a Tavus human could do it. He also remarked, “I didn’t make it past French I.”⁠[1]

On November 13, 2025, The AI Report released an episode hosted by Liam Lawson with him and Hassaan Raza as guests, recorded at Tavus’s office in San Francisco; the episode page describes Tavus as a research lab focused on “human computing.”⁠[2]

He said in the episode that Tavus’s job “isn’t to replace humans, it’s to replace bad machines.” Asked why he does what he does, he said that Tavus can have a ripple effect on the world, from education and healthcare to how the elderly communicate with machines and have companions, to how young people learn and organize their thoughts, and that “this is the best place and the highest leverage I have to achieve that.”⁠[2]

Tavus: Official website: https://www.tavus.io/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/quinn-favret/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]