Essence Venture Capital

Chen-Ping Yu Verified account @yuchenping · 4d

After Google acquired my AR startup, I started thinking about the next interface, this time for AI. Text and voice work fine, just like DOS did before the Mac. But nothing’s more intuitive than face to face.

After two years of research, today we’re launching Atmee v2: a real-time avatar model that makes live video agents feel truly life-like.

• Any character from 1 image + 10s of audio
• Contextual expressions, gestures, even interacting with the environment
• Live video calls, voice only, or video generation

At its core, Atmee v2 is a video foundation model, it can render anything, but it’s built to excel at characters, which is what video models like Seedance 2.5 and Wan 3.0 are mostly used for. In comparison:
Atmee v2

• Up to 50x faster
• 10-100x cheaper

Build tutors, sales coaches, support agents, companions, game characters, even whole living worlds. The interface after text and voice starts today.

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Ronak Malde Verified account @rronak_ · 6d

Imagine if everyone had the tools to shape intelligence itself. That day is today.

Today we launch the Trajectory platform - the easiest and most intuitive tool to post-train models of your own. The foundation for continual learning.

With just a few agent prompts, you get access to a full creative suite to train, eval, and deploy trillion parameter models.

On top of that, we believe in a future where you don’t just shape your model once, it also keeps learning on its own from the world around it.

We’re releasing two research previews.

1. Continual grading scales your taste, so your model learns what good looks like from far more than you could ever grade by hand.
2. GS1, a new algorithm that lets models learn directly from what they do in production.

We’ve now raised 60M, with a new round led by @Sequoia at a 300M valuation to democratize the most powerful technology of today - training models - so that the lawyers, doctors, and engineers of the world can own their own intelligence.

You know what good looks like, now go build it. Own your own value function with Trajectory.

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Ronak Malde Verified account @rronak_ · Oct 27

Some of Trajectory's early technical team

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