Delphi Programs Expert “Digital Minds”

AI startup Delphi has raised a $16 million Series A round to empower experts in various fields to create chatbots based on their body of work.

Why It Hits: While Meta has rolled out celebrity-inspired chatbots and CharacterAI has sparked controversy with its AI companions, Delphi is taking a different approach — focusing on real-world experts to build AI extensions of their knowledge, accessible to anyone, anytime.

Behind the Code: Delphi doesn’t want to build clones of experts… it wants to craft “digital minds.”

• Chatbot creators can choose from four subscription tiers (free, $79, $399, or $2,499 per month) that give them access to training data sets, voice and video calling, and analytics. 
• Creators have the ability to charge users for sessions, keeping roughly 85% of the proceeds. They can also pinpoint exactly when they want a paywall to kick in for users.
• The startup, which launched in 2022, already counts icon Arnold Schwarzenegger, HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan, and wellness coach Koya Webb among its chatbot creators.
• The new $16 million fundraising to expand its web-based creator toolkit was led by Sequoia Capital. Additional investors include Menlo Ventures and Anthropic’s Anthology Fund, Michael Ovitz’s Crossbeam, and others.

The Future: Co-founder and CEO Dara Ladjevardian stresses that Delphi’s mission is not to create deepfakes of creators but to accurately capture how they “reason about things.” That gives Delphi the ability to offer creators’ “personalized advice,” which “can be predictive of what [creators] might say in new situations.”

Prediction: If Delphi takes off, AI-powered, personalized TED Talks could become a thing.