Haasaan Raza | Exclusive Forbes Full Interview
In this Forbes‑hosted interview, founder Hassaan Raza walks through the origin, technology, market, and future of Tavis, a generative‑AI platform that creates hyper‑personalized video messages at scale. Raza recounts how, while at Google in 2019, he helped non‑technical founders with cold‑email outreach and discovered the scalability problem of manually produced personalized videos. Leveraging early generative‑AI research, Tavis now clones a user’s face and voice from a two‑minute recording, enabling companies to send thousands of realistic, AI‑generated videos with a usage‑based pricing model. The platform serves sales and marketing teams at firms such as Salesforce, Ramp, The Chainsmokers, and Wonder, and emphasizes ultra‑realistic output, transparency, and strict identity verification to prevent misuse. Raza welcomes regulation and has built Face ID/Voice ID checks to ensure only the rightful owner can be cloned. He outlines Tavis’s fundraising journey—from a pre‑seed with Liquid2 and Zoogler network, through Y Combinator ’21, a Sequoia‑led seed, a seed extension, and a recent Series A led by Scale, totaling $20‑25 M. The capital fuels research into more expressive models, deeper content personalization from minimal CRM data, and tools that reduce training time and equipment needs. Revenue grew 20‑30 % month‑over‑month after the public launch in early 2023, reaching a $1‑2 M run‑rate. Raza envisions “personalize every play,” expanding from enterprise customers to creators and influencers in 2024, while maintaining a focus on ethics, joy‑creating experiences, and a long‑term goal of an IPO. He shares personal founder lessons—celebrating small wins, dealing only with nice people, and ensuring actions serve a greater good—as part of his desired legacy of leaving the world a little better and putting smiles on people’s faces.
Chapters
Hassaan, it is so good to be here with you today.
You as well. Yeah, thank you for having me.
Of course. So let's start at the very beginning. Tell me about your founding story.
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, if we rewind back to like 2019, I was at Google at the time, but I was running a product studio that started, you know, years ago. And so we would be helping traditionally non-tech founders build their tech startups. And so You know, they'd come to me and they'd be like, Hassaan, we built this shiny product, but how do we sell it? I'm like, well, we built a shiny product. Isn't it your job to sell it? But fine, we'll, we'll go ahead and help you out. So we'd, you know, help them set up cold email funnels and, you know, LinkedIn messaging. And that all worked fine, but it always felt like there was a little bit of friction involved in it. And so at the time, you know, video was becoming pretty popular. We're all addicted to TikTok by then, right? So personalized video is sort of this emerging topic. And we actually told them, hey, how about you send out personalized videos manually, and let's see how it works. And it actually worked amazingly. Response rates were far higher than traditional channels. And we're like, OK, this actually works. But they soon came back and said, hey, this was really painful. 200 videos took 12, 13 hours to record, edit, send. This is not scalable. So then it was sort of a lightbulb moment. I was actually already working on some generative AI tech back in the day. So now we say we're doing generative AI before it was cool. So it's sort of a lightbulb moment. Why not use generative AI tech to make personalized video scalable?
So very cool. So then walk me through, if I'm a company today trying to use your technology, how does it work?
Yeah, so it's super, super simple. So it requires no studios like this beautiful one. It's really at home. You can be on your computer. You can give us 2 minutes of data where You know, you basically read off a script that we give you, and then we're able to create a really, really high-quality AI clone of you. And so that's pretty much it. We'll clone your voice and your face so that you can then send thousands of personalized videos in the same time it would take you to record and send just like a couple.
Wow. Who are your customers and who's your target market?
Yeah, so we focus on sales and marketing teams today. So our customers include like Salesforce, Ramp, And then a couple really awesome ones as well. The Chainsmokers are also one of our customers. So super, super awesome group. And yeah, we typically target sales and marketing teams that are looking to scale out their outreach. So it might be, you know, a sales marketing team that's using like their CEO to send out thousands of like thank you videos, or maybe the salesperson reaching out, or maybe, you know, Wonder is one of our customers as well. And they were using it for their chefs to send out like personalized thank yous for like ordering from his restaurant. And so that personal touch, it goes a pretty long way.
Do you have any competitors in this space? And if so, how are you standing out from them?
Yeah, so I mean, there's definitely some competitors in this space. There's like Synthesia, which is a pretty, pretty big one. And I think that our core sort of ideology and how we approach AI is really different. For us, like the bar has always been realism has to be, you know, incredibly high. The bar is really high for us. So the models that we've created are the most realistic in the market. So you can't really tell that it's AI. And so whether it's the gestures, whether it's how you look, the voice itself, we go for a level of naturalness that no one else is able to accomplish today. And so that's really our key differentiating factor. I think there's also a lot that we do around transparency and ethics that is pretty important too.
That's my next question was ethics. So I'm glad you brought that up. And you said you're doing AI before AI is cool. AI is so cool right now. It is the new thing. How do you look at the new legislation that may be brought into place or ethics as you're thinking about how to scale your company?
Yeah, so I think actually we welcome regulation. I think that there are a lot of companies playing a little fast and loose, and ultimately I don't think that's actually good for anyone. So for us, we would rather work with legislators to build very safe regulation that doesn't hinder actual progress in the space but allows it to be used in a safe way. So for us, we've always— built a platform around, you know, giving power to the user and giving power to the individual, which means that, like, you can't upload someone else's video and clone them. It won't let you. We run Face ID and Voice ID checks to ensure that you are the person that you're trying to clone. So we take an approach that's, like, very, very safe in that regard. You can't, you know, upload a video of Biden or something and, like, get him to say something else. It's not possible on the Tavis platform.
Okay. Oh, that's really interesting. So, back to you and your fundraising journey. Talk to me about that, how you started out and what fundraising has been able to afford you.
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, we started out with the pre-seed with Liquid2. So, you know, one of— through like the Zoogler network, which is the ex-Googler network, Michael Mah was one of our earliest sort of believers and he gave us a small pre-seed check along with, you know, Remus Capital. Then we went through YC, Summer of '21. Which was awesome. So that was a great experience. And then August of '21, we raised our seed with Sequoia being the lead. And so it's been a pretty awesome journey. Since then, we've raised 2 more rounds. We raised a seed extension in '22, and then most recently raised a Series A a couple of months ago with Scale leading it and a ton of really awesome investors, HubSpot also involved. So super, super cool. I think we've raised a total of somewhere around like $20-25 mil now.
Wow, that's great. Congrats. And what have you been able to do with it, or what do you want to do with that?
Yeah, so I think, you know, our sort of vision is like, how can we build a future where every single video you watch is personalized just for you? So we summarize that by saying we want to personalize every play. And so, you know, with the funding, we're going to be continuing our research to build even more powerful models that can more accurately display human emotion and gestures. So we have some really, really cool stuff in play there. And then we're also working on a lot of content personalization tools. So how do you take basic data from a CRM? CRM has your first name, maybe where you went to school. How do you turn something from being like, hey there, Hassaan, saw that you went to UT Austin, to instead saying something like, hey there, Hassaan, saw that you went to UT Austin, hook 'em, saw they're doing awesome at football last week. You build that content to be a lot more personalized, and they're able to build a video that is way more personalized. So we're doing a ton around building better models for content personalization and of course, face generation.
Interesting. Now talk to me about how your sales growth has gone from inception to right now. What have you been seeing?
Yeah, so we officially launched— we were sort of stealth and beta for all of 2022. So then we finally launched towards the end of January of '23. And the growth has been incredible. We've grown 20%, 30% month over month. We exceeded a mil of revenue probably towards the middle half of this year and are on track to end right around 2 mil of revenue. So super, super excited about that. And next year we're excited to multiply that many times over, hopefully.
That's so exciting. And how does it work? Do your customers pay a monthly fee to use this, or is it per video?
Yeah, good question. So it's sort of a usage-based model, but it's upfront sort of commitment. So you say, hey, I'm going to be using this many videos per month. And then you pay for that at the beginning of the month. And if you go over, then you just get charged the per-video cost.
Interesting. OK, very cool. Is there any world in which you would think about selling your company? And if so, what would it take?
That would be a tough, tough thing for me to do. I think that obviously we'll see how things go. We're here for the long term, right? We're here for the IPO. That's what we're going towards.
Oh, that's exciting. I will look forward to that.
Absolutely.
So looking back, is there anything that you wish you'd known the day before starting your company that you'd tell yourself, you know, back then and that you wish you'd known now?
Hmm, let's see. I mean, I wish I knew a lot of things back then, right? I think that, you know, trying to— I wish I knew more around like how difficult of a journey it really will be, right? You go into it and you're like, yeah, this is super cool. And like, it still is super awesome. I mean, you know, it's been an amazing journey, but to just like take a little bit more time for yourself, right? Because, you know, I think that like as founders, you're like always going a million miles per hour. And I think that now looking back, we didn't really celebrate the small wins enough because we're like, oh yeah, there's something else to do, right? And so if I were to tell a younger version of me, I'd be like, hey, take the time to actually celebrate the small wins, that first sale, that first investment, that first yes whenever you're going through fundraising. Celebrate those small wins instead of just being like, yeah, well, we have this other thing to do now.
Right, right. Is there one business rule that you always operate by no matter what?
Only deal with nice people. It's not worth dealing with people who aren't nice. But that's pretty much it, I think. And also I think it goes back to the ethics piece, which is like, Always take a step back and evaluate what you're doing and make sure that you're doing it for good and not just for greed.
That's good life rule too.
Absolutely, yeah.
You can use it for both.
Exactly.
Do you think that the future of marketing is in AI, and is that how you see the marketing space going?
Absolutely. I think that it's been trending this way for a while now. I think that the way I like to see it, this isn't— for marketing, but also, you know, for content in general, right? Like the past like decade of like AI advancements were spent building really powerful recommendation algorithms. So you would take generic content and try to match it best. I mean, the reason we're addicted to TikTok is because it makes you feel like the algorithm's made just for you, right? Or the videos are made just for you, but they're not. We see a future where it's like, okay, well the next phase is like, let's actually make the content just for you. So it's not just recommending, it's not just recommending you content, it's actually creating content for you. And I think for marketing, that will absolutely be essential, right? To actually be able to personalize messaging so that you can get past the boundary that exists in the attention economy, right? Because our attention is our most scarce, our most valuable resource. But it's so hard to get our attention these days because we have so much that we could consume that we're actively sort of trying to make sure we don't accidentally watch a video or consume something that isn't really relevant to us.
That makes sense. So that leads me to my next question. The future for you and your company, where do you see it going? And is there anything on the horizon in 2024 that you can tell us about?
Yeah. So, I mean, you know, our vision to personalize every play is, you know, we're hard at it, right? So I think for us, you know, the future of the company is we want to empower like every creator, every marketer to be able to, you know, deliver incredibly personalized content for every single video someone watches. And so we're working on some really, really cool models that we'll release in the coming months that will reduce the amount of training time required, reduce the amount of professional camera equipment that's required to actually create a professional video of yourself. And then we're doing a ton around how do we actually create really, really awesome content that's personalized for an individual with very minimal data, right? So with just a few pieces of information, information on someone, you're able to create incredibly personalized content for them. So we have a lot of really, really cool sort of tools coming out for that.
You'd mentioned creators right now.
Are—
because it seems like it's mostly businesses and corporations that use your tech. Are you hoping to expand this then to creators and influencers to be able to automatically create videos?
Yeah. So it's something that we're currently sort of deciding right now. I think that we want to try to stay very focused. I think that businesses are one that we focus on historically. But I think with time, I think over the course of 2024, we'll start to open up access to more individuals, more creators, because ultimately we want this to be a tool that inspires people. I mean, I think the best part about Tavis is that whenever we talk about it with someone, they like dream. They're like, wait, I could use it for this, right? They're like, yeah. Like, you know, they imagine like, wow, I could go to Disney World, get on Iron Man ride, and then Tony Stark sends me a personal video thanking them for defeating Thanos. And we're like, yeah, those are really awesome ideas. We love when people dream about them. So we want to open the tool in the future up to allow anyone to be able to actually get on and make their dream a reality. So absolutely, that is in the plans. Timeline TBD though.
Very cool. And speaking of dreams, what would you like your legacy to be?
Hmm, let's see. I think it's tough. I think if you ask overall, I think what I'd like my legacy to be is just is a legacy of like leaving the world a little bit better than I found it. And also just like, you know, putting more smiles on people's faces, right? Like, I think that like, that's what I really love about Tavis is like, whenever people get that first video, whenever like a fan gets outreach from someone they really care about and they're happy, right? Delivering moments of joy. So if I can do that over the course of my entire life, I think it's pretty good.
Well, that's a great way to end. So thank you so much, Hassaan.
Of course, thanks for having me.
