Delphi

Create your digital mind

August 4th, 2025

We’re coming to Utah.

As you’ll find with this week’s coverage, Delphi might be making some great virtual personas you can chat with online. And when it comes to the IRL front, if you’re in Salt Lake City and you want to grab drinks with us (and some awesome founders + investors), register for our event on August 14.

The Unicorn Club awaits!

Arek and Ethan 🦄

Delphi AI is allowing people to build a “digital mind” of themselves called a Delphi. A Delphi is a personalized, AI-powered persona that can have interactive conversations across multiple mediums including text, voice, and video. By providing data such as blog posts, YouTube videos, and more, a user can create their Delphi and have it authentically engage with their online audiences at scale. Some example use cases include a CEO creating a Delphi to interact with employees, a YouTuber using a Delphi to connect with fans, or a career coach offering additional coaching sessions through their Delphi.

Check it out: delphi.ai

Delphi operates using a freemium model with four tiers: Starter, Builder, Scaler, and Unlimited. Each tier is differentiated by capabilities, insights, and integrations, and have varying limits on features and training volume. Specific pricing is outlined on its pricing page.

The Starter tier is ideal for individuals or small creators just beginning to experiment with building the concept of having a digital mind, and includes chat access, a Delphi page, and 100,000 training words. The Builder tier is designed for the professional or creator looking to grow their audience and digital presence. This tier includes voice calling Delphis and access to analytics for deeper audience insights, along with a higher limit of up to 5 million training words.

Scaler is tailored for users who are scaling engagement across an existing audience. It includes advanced features like video calling Delphis, professional voice customization with EQ, and a higher training capacity of 12 million words. Finally, the Unlimited tier is best suited for customers with a large audience. This tier includes all features and capabilities that Delphi offers.

  • Raised a $16 million Series A led by Sequoia with participation from Menlo and Anthropic’s joint Anthology Fund, Proximity Ventures, and more in June 2025

  • Has grown 4x in revenue and 2x in headcount since November 2024

Dara Ladjevardian, co-founder of Delphi, has been working and building in the AI space since 2014. At that time, he read Ray Kurzweil’s book, published a year prior, called “How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed,” which talked about reverse-engineering the brain using its knowledge to create intelligent technology. Ladjevardian was fascinated with the idea. By training an LLM on a book his grandfather had written, he was able to create a digital version of his late grandfather, a well-known entrepreneur in Iran. 

In 2021, he started and sold his own AI company called Friday, which enabled users to buy anything through a simple text message. After Friday’s acquisition, he worked as an engineer at a company called OpenStore, where he met Samuel Spelsberg, his eventual co-founder at Delphi. Prior to working as a data and infrastructure engineer at OpenStore, Spelsberg had worked at Apple and an autonomous driving company called Argo AI. The team started and launched Delphi in November 2022, a month before ChatGPT was released to the public.

Many professionals, founders, and creators today are battling a scalability ceiling, not because they lack ideas or value, but because their growing audience demands more time and energy than they can produce. Delphi aims to solve this by letting individuals replicate how they think, speak, and teach; it is creating AI-powered “digital minds” that scale presence without sacrificing personality. These personalized agents enable anyone to reach their audience 24/7 without diluting voice, tone, or intent.

Delphi focuses on scaling individual expertise while preserving each user’s unique identity and intent rather than building general-purpose avatars. A Delphi is trained exclusively on a user’s original content, like podcasts, blogs, webinars, or long-form writing, making it a true digital extension of their personal brand. Beyond the clone itself, Delphi provides integrations and usage insights to help creators understand audience behavior. The result? Amplified influence and a consistent digital presence that runs on autopilot.

Chatting with a Delphi.

While platforms like character.ai or Replika create digital avatars and personas for entertainment, Delphi designs digital clones to inform, teach, and engage. Trust is central to this model. Only verified individuals can create Delphis, and each one is trained strictly on the creator’s own material. Importantly, user data is never pooled to train broader models, and creators retain full ownership and control of their data. In an era of growing AI skepticism, Delphi is staking its position around authenticity, privacy, and hyper-personalization not just as features, but as foundational principles.

In conversation, Delphi co-founder Dara Ladjevardian described Delphi not just as a product, but as the new medium for knowledge transfer. Communication has evolved from print to radio to television to podcast, each unlocking broader access to information. Delphi, in his view, is the next leap; it’s a medium for living, interactive knowledge that’s both curated and personalized. Imagine a digital mind trained on an expert’s complete archive capable of answering questions, referencing sources, and distilling years of insights in real time. If it executes on this, Delphi will be defining a new category of media, an ambitious and promising north star for the company. 

Delphi’s early traction is real, and the team backing it brings both technical depth and conviction to their digital mind thesis. They’re starting from a position of strength, and it’s clear they’ll be a force to be reckoned with. When I asked Ladjevardian what challenges lay ahead and how that informs their current roadmap, he pointed to users not grasping the concept behind Delphi. Right now, some prospective users struggle to recognize what a digital mind is, or why it matters, until they’ve already set one up. Ladjevardian calls this the “time to magic,” or the time it takes until a user realizes the value of a digital mind. Addressing this means sharper onboarding and intuitive product marketing upfront.

For creators, coaches, and domain experts, the ability to scale without dilution is a superpower, and Delphi’s platform puts that power in reach. From our perspective, the team has the technical depth, product intuition, and long-term conviction to execute on that vision. If they can meet users where they are and get them to “magic” faster, they will be the leaders in letting people scale their most valuable asset: themselves.