In 2018, Daimon Labs’ founder and CEO, Dr. Ryan Benmalek, was the winner of LDV Capital’s Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge. A brilliant Ph.D. student studying Computer Science at Cornell University’s Computer Vision Lab under Serge Belongie, one of LDV’s experts in residence, at the time, he presented the “Neural Painter” – a novel method to design & prototype anything you can imagine by simply describing it long before the overheated trend of Generative AI.

**Ryan Benmalek presents “Neural Painter, a method to design & prototype things by describing them” during the Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge at LDV Capital’s 5th Annual LDV Vision Summit (May 23-24, 2018) long before the overheated trend of** **Generative AI. © Robert Wright**

After winning the competition, Evan Nisselson, General Partner at LDV Capital, has had regular calls with Ryan for the past four years to brainstorm how applications related to Ryan’s deep tech expertise will revolutionize the world as we know it today. The idea of building the next-generation human-like emotional AI platform excited the team of founders the most and led to the formation of Daimon Labs.

At LDV Capital, we invest in people building businesses powered by visual technologies. We thrive on collaborating with deep tech teams leveraging computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze visual data. We are the only venture capital firm with this thesis since 2012.

**From left to right: Dr. Ryan Benmalek (CEO), Dhruv Malik (CPO) & Dr. Xiang Zhang (Chief Scientist)**

We are excited to partner and invest in the exceptional Daimon Labs team - deep technical founders building generative AI and large language models with human-like empathy. Their technological approach has resulted in being able to train state-of-the-art neural models on over a trillion data points, more than comparable large language models on the market, to deliver artificial intelligence that has memory as well as human-like empathy and the ability to tailor conversations.

Current approaches for building large language models for human-like empathy are limited by the following factors: they rely on external language model APIs that have extremely high training costs and are slow to iterate, they are not trained on a sufficient amount of relevant data points, or they have too many parameters for scalable unit economics. As a result, there is a market opportunity for a high-quality conversational AI bot to enable emotional intelligence.

Daimon Lab’s technology platform has the potential for deployment across many different verticals. They are first addressing the problem of widespread loneliness in today’s society, particularly among youth. Humans are social animals, hard-wired to seek out meaningful social connections. According to data commissioned by Cigna, more than half of US adults (58%) are considered lonely, and 80% of young adults between 18-24 years old suffer from loneliness.

AI-powered digital beings with empathy who can act as companions can build long-lasting relationships with members. Daimon Labs launched a private closed beta for its chatbot in November 2022, where members were able to chat and interact with their companionship bot on the web, Discord, and over SMS. Early beta members have already built special relationships with Daimon Labs’ chatbot.

Daimon Labs is being developed by an all-star team of 3 co-founders including 2 Ph.Ds. Ryan has also worked at Apple, where he generated synthetic data to improve Siri question answering, and Google, where he trained large-scale multimodal models to communicate with language models.

The other co-founders are Dhruv Malik, Chief Product Officer (MIT, Ivee, HYPR, T-Mobile) & Dr. Xiang Zhang, Chief Scientist (NYU Ph.D. under the advisement of Professor Yann LeCun, Facebook, Google AI).

We at LDV Capital led their oversubscribed $1.5M pre-seed round along with co-investors Data Community Fund, Myelin VC & strategic angels. See more details in Kerry Flynn’s article “Exclusive: Daimon Labs reveals friendship chatbot” on Axios and sign up for Daimon Labs’ mailing list to receive beta access to your personal AI companion.

“We at LDV Capital are thrilled to partner with the Daimon Labs team to build the digital beings of the future with cutting-edge AI and human-like empathy. We have known Ryan for years since 2018 when he won the Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge at our LDV Vision Summit and was a Ph.D. candidate with Serge Belongie who is also a LDV Capital Expert in Residence. We believe the team will revolutionize how AI will be able to form meaningful connections with humans and provide assistance with our daily lives from social interactions to learning new skills to being a valuable companion,” says Evan Nisselson, Founder and General Partner at LDV Capital.

We look forward to helping Daimon Labs leverage our visual tech domain expertise and expert network as the only venture fund with a thesis of investing in people building businesses powered by visual technologies.

This post was written in collaboration with Ash Cleary, an analyst at LDV Capital.

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