Tavus
Tavus is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company founded by Hassaan Raza and Quinn Favret; it develops digital humans that hold real-time face-to-face video conversations, along with related multimodal models, and calls itself a “human computing” company.
Contents10 sections
Key facts
2020Founded in San Francisco
According to TechCrunch, Tavus was founded in San Francisco in 2020 by Hassaan Raza (CEO) and Quinn Favret.[1]
2021Joining Y Combinator
The company took part in Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 batch; Y Combinator’s company page lists its founding year as 2021.[2]
March 2023$6.1 Million Seed Round
TechCrunch reported that Tavus had raised a $6.1 million seed round led by Sequoia, with participation from Accel, Index Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures and others; at the time its product generated personalized videos for individual recipients from a single initial recording.[1]
March 12, 2024$18 Million Series A
Tavus raised an $18 million Series A led by Scale Venture Partners, with Sequoia, Y Combinator and HubSpot participating. The report said the company helped businesses create digital “replicas” of individuals for automated personalized video campaigns; Quinn Favret was then chief operating officer.[3]
December 2025AI Santa
TechCrunch covered Tavus’s AI Santa interactive experience; Hassaan Raza said the previous year’s version had drawn millions of hits. The report explained PAL as the company’s name for its real-time AI agents that see, hear, respond and appear human.[4]
July 29, 2026Launch of PAL Maker
The company launched PAL Maker, which lets users create a PAL through conversation without coding. The company describes a PAL as a conversational application that sees and hears users, responds in real time with a face and voice, and remembers people over time.[5]
October 1, 2026Griffin Research Preview
The company announced Griffin, which it calls a “Human Interaction Model,” designed to process expressions, pauses and words together in live face-to-face exchanges; its research preview, Griffin-Lite, was open only to select trusted testers and not yet available to customers.[6]
As of October 2026: Products and Models
Tavus’s website describes it as an AI research lab focused on “human computing”; its main product is the PAL (Personified Application Layer), which can be built through an API, a no-code tool or a managed enterprise service. Its models include Sparrow for conversational turn-taking, Phoenix for real-time face rendering, and Raven for perception.[7]
Related Organizations, Websites, and Public Accounts
Tavus: Official website: https://www.tavus.io/ (opens in a new window)[7]
X: Official account: https://x.com/tavus (opens in a new window)[7]
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: Official account: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tavus-io/ (opens in a new window)[7]
Sources
- Tavus taps generative AI to power personalized videos with voice and face cloning (opens in a new window)
- Tavus: Building the human layer of AI (opens in a new window)
- Generative AI video startup Tavus raises $18M to bring face and voice cloning to any app (opens in a new window)
- AI startup Tavus founder says users talk to its AI Santa ‘for hours’ per day (opens in a new window)
- Introducing PAL Maker: Come Build With Me (opens in a new window)
- Griffin: The First Human Interaction Model (opens in a new window)
- Tavus: The Human Computing Company (opens in a new window)