The San Francisco-based company debuted a digital brand studio this week that lets clients customize their own digital person by choosing from a set of realistic CGI avatars and uploading conversational trees with natural language processing systems from Google or IBM. Founded by Academy Award-winning visual effects engineer Mark Sagar and entrepreneur Greg Cross at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, Soul Machines is part of a small but growing scene of startups exploring how life-like human avatars can be put to use in business contexts, whether as virtual influencers, extensions of celebrity personalities or for interpersonal interaction practice. "The objective here is not to replace people, it's to really focus on things that are very, very difficult for organizations to deliver, like infinitely scalable customer interactions or infinitely scalable customer support at a completely different level of economics," Cross said. The company has raised $47.5 million to date from investors including Hong Kong-based Horizon Ventures and Salesforce's venture capital arm. It has already worked with a select set of clients on customer support avatars, including a digital customer service rep for Air New Zealand named Sophie, a car salesperson named Sarah for Mercedes-Benz and a virtual financial advisor named Jamie for Australia and New Zealand Banking Group.