Artificial intelligence company Tavus has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by CRV with participation from Scale Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, HubSpot Ventures, and Flex Capital. The company plans to use this funding to expand and advance its development of its digital human technology.
Tavus, which has been founded and led by Hassaan Raza, is developing “Personal Affective Links” or PALs. These PALs are digital agents that interact with people through video, voice, and text while recognizing emotion and context.
Raza described PALs as “emotionally intelligent, multimodal, and capable of understanding and perceiving,” in a LinkedIn. “With PALs, we’re finally teaching machines to think like humans—to see, hear, respond, and look like we do,” Raza added. The agent combines rendering, speech comprehension, and contextual awareness to simulate human behavior in real-time interactions.
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According to Raza’s LinkedIn post, PALs “meet users where they are,” understand them, evolve with them, and can handle complex tasks.
Each PAL is powered by a set of proprietary models developed entirely in-house by Tavus’ research team. These models include Phoenix-4 which manages visual rendering, Sparrow-1 which allows the agents to express subtle human cues and handles audio comprehension, and Raven-1 which interprets broader context.
“We’ve spent decades forcing humans to learn to speak the language of machines,” Raza said. “With PALs, we’re finally teaching machines to think like humans—to see, hear, respond, and look like we do. To understand emotion, context, and all the messy, beautiful stuff that makes us who we are. It’s not about more intelligent AI, it’s about AI that actually meets you where you are.”
Tavus has released five initial PALs to demonstrate their capabilities in practical settings. Each agent has a distinct “personality.”
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The company’s research team is continuing to refine Phoenix-4, Sparrow-1, and Raven-1, focusing on improving rendering quality, audio comprehension, and context perception. PALs are implemented with selected clients to evaluate functionality in operational environments.
Interactions are documented to monitor performance, improve responsiveness, and maintain consistent communication quality. The Series B funding will support scaling the research team, and extending PAL deployment. Users and enterprises can access PALs on Tavus’ platform. “We use these insights to ensure PALs respond accurately and consistently across different scenarios,” Raza said.
In his LinkedIn post, Raza compared PALs to technology mentioned in science fiction, which “promised us a new human-computer interface, beyond the GUIs of yesterday, a human-like interface that would feel second-nature to use.”