Lemon Slice, a startup launched in 2024 by Lina Colucci, Sidney Primas, and Andrew Weitz, has recently garnered attention for raising $10.5 million in seed funding. This funding will allow them to grow their innovative digital avatar technology. The round was led by Matrix Partners and Y Combinator. Other high-profile investors included Dropbox CTO Arash Ferdowsi, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear and the music stars The Chainsmokers. The company is focused on bringing interactivity to video content, an advancement that has the potential to greatly improve user experience beyond the educational field.
With generative AI technology powered by a groundbreaking diffusion model, Lemon Slice’s tech specializes in producing realistic dynamic avatars. With only one GPU, these avatars can live-stream videos at 20 frames per second. Its powerful feat of creativity is thanks to a highly-advanced 20-billion-parameter model. This model is flexible enough to scale across use cases like education, language learning, e-commerce and corporate training. The startup’s proven approach builds on the scaling tactics that have already worked in other AI modalities.
Today, Lemon Slice runs with a small team of eight full-time employees— passionate people committed to improving the technology and taking it to the next level. The newly acquired capital will be used to double their engineering headcount and largely fund their go-to-market execution. The funds will go directly towards the computational costs required to train the models that fuel their avatars.
Lina Colucci, co-founder of Lemon Slice, shared the reason for the startup’s emphasis on interactive video. In those incubation days of GenAI, my co-founders began to tinker with various video models and it quickly became clear to us that video was going to be an interactive experience. She acknowledged that the most engaging part of tools like ChatGPT is their interactivity. We want to do that same thing, create that same layer of engagement, for video,” she continued.
The startup has a different vision than everyone else in the space. Rather than designing custom solutions for particular use cases or verticals, it has been adopting a one-size-fits-all scaling approach. Ilya Sukhar, a partner at Matrix Partners, said he was excited about Lemon Slice’s ability to power a new generation of video-based applications. He added that avatars will become more essential in fields that are video-driven.
“Beyond the hype, Colucci made a strong case for the limitations of avatar technologies currently available. “The existing avatar solutions I’ve seen to date add negative value to the product,” she stated. In contrast, Lemon Slice hopes to be a better answer with its machine learning rudiments.”
Technical superiority is the main draw that distinguishes Lemon Slice from competitors. As Colucci pointed out, “It’s a deeply technical team with a track record of shipping ML products, not just demos and research.” This unique capability, paired with their innovative model design, gives Lemon Slice the ability to leapfrog competitors struggling with the pitfalls of other avatar technologies.
What makes the startup remarkable is the quality of the models it can train, such as photorealistic avatars. These avatars are able to beat what we are calling the “avatar Turing test.” Their video diffusion transformer model underpins this new capability. Whether the face is human or non-human, with only a few examples provided as input, it’s able to replicate and even render new faces seamlessly.
As Lemon Slice takes its first leaps on this ambitious path, we hope to begin to redefine the world of interactive video technologies. With good runway funding and a strong picture ahead, the startup is on a trajectory to grow. It’s poised to flourish and experiment in our ever more digital age.
