In this episode of the Full Throttle Leaders Podcast, host Michael Falato interviews Danny Tomsett, co‑founder and CEO of Unique, a company that builds digital‑human avatars and a training‑simulation platform. The conversation begins with the origin story: Unique was born in 2015 when the Australian government asked them to replace long hold times in disability‑benefit contact centers with a digital person on video calls. This early challenge led to the development of a “highway” technology that routes interactions to avatars. Tomsett explains Unique’s two core offerings: a digital‑human product that powers kiosks, retail assistants, airline virtual agents (e.g., a Qatar Airways avatar named Summer) and other customer‑facing experiences; and a training platform that lets sales, support, and healthcare staff practice realistic conversations with AI‑driven digital humans, complete with coaching and personality‑profile (DiSC) variations. He contrasts this with generic LLM role‑play, emphasizing the need for high‑fidelity simulations that mirror real‑world scenarios. The business model is a per‑seat subscription (~$500 per user per year), which includes all AI and integration components. Unique is VC‑backed, profitable, and employs about 50 people. Notable enterprise customers include Qatar Airways, Deutsche Telekom (Mia), and Dell Technologies, with plans to release more case studies. The platform integrates via APIs with CRM and analytics tools such as HubSpot, Salesforce, and custom BI systems, enabling data‑driven insights on training outcomes. Tomsett also discusses market timing, the rise of digital‑human companies, and how Unique positions itself against competitors like Gong or Fireflies by focusing on realistic, scenario‑driven simulations rather than simple chatbot role‑play. Contact information is provided (owenb@unique.com, www.unique.com). The episode ends with a brief sponsor plug for Full Throttle Falato Leads.
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All right, everybody, nice to see you again. We have a really special guest here, Danny Thompson from Unique. Is that how you pronounce it?
Unique, yeah.
Um, from one of my old stomping grounds in Auckland. Is it Auckland, New Zealand, or another part of New Zealand?
No, Auckland. You're right, that's where we, uh, where we started before moving to Austin.
And now he's in Austin where I used to live. So we're crossing paths but totally different, totally different space, but really cool company. Tell us a little bit about your company and how you grew it.
Yeah, thanks, Michael. I guess the start of our story is a really interesting one. We were actually working with the Australian government and they had a real challenge with One of the areas that they were trying to support people with disability who rely on the government for welfare services, and that made a whole lot of changes. And as government does sometimes, mucked it all up, and people were on hold for over 2 hours trying to do things. And, and they came to us and they, they had an idea. They said if we could put a digital person at the end of a video call— this is back in 2015. It was quite advanced for a government to say something like that, right? And they were like, if you could do that, that would be amazing. And we already had some technology that was close but never with the avatar digital human. So we ended up—
Was it voice then or what was it?
Yeah, so we were doing video into contact center and just doing that straight through the browser. So we created the highways. And they just wanted us to change the kind of car that was running on it, right? They were basically like, not human to human's not going to scale, it's not going to work.
So if you use these highways, you can now, yeah, just use the, was it the lamb or sheep in Auckland and have that operate the whole thing?
Yeah, the sheep carrier, you attach the message to the sheep.
Wasn't it like, isn't it like 8 times more sheep than people in Auckland?
There might have been a time, but I tell you, it's changed a lot. Yeah, dairy farming changed the game for New Zealand. So, but anyway, so we ended up solving this problem and I think my life really changed because I got to see how technology could truly impact and affect people's lives. And we got letters and we got to see, you know, families crying as they're using the service because it was it was making everything easier and accessible and, you know, people were getting access to food and finance, all sorts of things. So pretty amazing start to the journey of this company. And so we created this new company called Unique and focused on how do we really bring the humanity of digital humans, avatars that can interact just like you and I are doing now and solve a whole lot of problems. And Before you know it, you know, we have two key products. One is a digital human product, just like that origin story. You can build anything and companies use that today to build, you know, kiosks and retail stores and all sorts of things to help elderly with medications and all sorts of things.
And then like the airline person at the mall that I saw on your website.
Yeah, Summer from Qatar Airways, right? So she helps people like understand like what they're booking, coordinate flights, show them what first class would look like, and takes them for a virtual tour. All these different things that, you know, you, you couldn't really afford to pay humans to do. But now with this technology, you can, you can create that human touch across all parts of the, the customer journey.
You consider digital twin at all, or is that totally different approach?
Yeah, typically digital twin sometimes is, uh, you know, used in a number of contexts, but its best context is actually in manufacturing and like, like a digital copy of something physical that exists. And so, yeah, so better for like simulating and creating, you know, robotics design and things like that. I think in our world, you know, digital humans, it's definitely a category now. You've got Jansen, Nvidia, Zuckerberg, you've got even Elon Musk recently saying the next big companies, you know, are digital human companies. And so it's an exciting space to be in. Probably the most exciting, I will say, is our training product, which is, you know, in the field you and I both are in, which is how do you help people get better at what they do? And practice is so key to that. And for a lot of organizations, face-to-face interaction is the way that they do business. And it's very hard to practice that in a really efficient, scalable, and flexible way. And then we just came in with digital humans that operate as the customer or the patient or the employee, and you can practice and get AI coaching around that. And it's a great product.
Would you sell to like a Gong or Fireflies, or would that be somewhat they're trying to get into your space a little bit because they do?
I think it's a good question. I think that in many cases, creating role play with a large language model and doing something with what they're doing today is not hard to do. The hard part is actually creating simulations that are responsive and very much akin to what you'll face in the real world. It's kind of a little gimmick in some regards when some of these role-play experiences, they sort of feel kind of better than zero. But ultimately, the way I like to talk about it is if you came to me and you said, hey, my son wants to be an Olympic swimmer, and I'll be like, dude, do you have a bathtub in your house? And you're like, I do. If I said to you, just use the bathtub in your house, that will get him there. You just, you'd think I'm a fool. But ironically, most roleplay experiences are like a bathtub to what the real world thing is. What he really needs is a swimming pool. He needs something that's going to at least simulate what the Olympic pool is going to be like when he goes to swim in it. And that's ultimately what we are very good at, is creating those simulations that feel very, very real to what you'll face in the real world.
We, we had to go in front of like a a sales kickoff, have everybody looking at us and have a simulation with the VP of Sales. It was horrible.
Yeah.
Or we had to get on a call and then we would basically listen to the old school headset next to the person making a phone call and trying to learn.
Yeah.
It's just such a different world with what you're doing.
It's a It's, I think what's exciting about this is it's so well understood in many regards why practice is useful. Like in sports, we do this all the time. Like if we're gonna learn an instrument, we do this all the time. It's just been really hard in our professional careers to do something that's actually meaningful practice. That's, I think the right word for it. So it's gotta be meaningful practice. It's actually gotta be something that you're gonna face in the real world. And you've already faced it in simulation. That's why, you know, Top Gun fighter jet pilots, they spend more hours in the simulation than they do in the actual planes. But that simulation—
I was in the Air Force. I know that. I wasn't a pilot, but, you know, I started jiu-jitsu in Austin, and that's all about, you know, if you don't spar, you don't get better. Same thing with playing the pipe or a salesperson. You don't practice. And you can't, you're like, if you have to take up 2 or 3 people's time and different personalities, you can ask your tool to be like crude, rude, too friendly, to get talking, right? I mean, you can probably set the tone, you know, 100%.
And there's so many fundamentals, like we have a lot of sales playbooks and there's fundamentals to, you know, the methodologies and what you do, but there's fundamentals just to being a human that someone wants to buy from? You know what I mean? Like, do you listen well? Do you have integrity? Does your character say, I'm trustworthy? You know, do you become responsive with empathy and validation? Hey, like, you want to draw out pain because that's the key to sales, right? I can solve that pain for you, right? But at the same time, if you're doing that, how good are you truly at saying, hey, that You know, those things are really tough, you know, or actually making the person feel like you're in it with them. Those are like the things that actually matter just as much as the methodology. And, you know, we can cover the whole—
Yeah, my friend who I worked with, I was in HR tech a lot, so might be some place for that, for this as well. But he's been beating this thing, building this thing called GTM Heroes where The whole idea is don't use a playbook that's meant for everybody. Everybody has their own style, and every person that you, you do a pitch to or deck to or a conversation to needs to be about them. It's not one size fits all. And that's kind of what you're doing with yours. It's like, this is the industry, this type of people. Here's the persona. This is what we're going to practice today, but tomorrow we're going to go talk to IBM who are much different type of people, whatever it is, right? Yeah, set it up and then learn from it and then keep it going and changing it so that you keep on becoming better and better and better, right?
That's it. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's the, that's the cool thing about it. It's not a hard concept to buy into. And now the problem is the technology never was good enough to really meet the expectation of what would be meaningful practice and Now we're at that time where, you know, companies like Unique are making that possible.
There was a lady that just started to try doing this about a year ago, and the WeWorks CRO came over there and they were doing what you were doing, but it was just like they got in it too early because I think, you know, it's just like you got to— the timing matters a lot too. What is your average revenue per client target? Like, Is it per seat, per month license? Is it a here, here's the scope and it's going to be a flat cost or usage credit or how are you kind of set up to make money?
Yeah, despite a lot of AI companies trying to do things differently with tokens and other things, we've kept pretty true to the per seat model in this. The reason being is I really like a store of record that you have per individual that's really tracking progress, holding assessments so you can run assessments as well. So you can move them into different stages of their career or qualifying for recruitment and all the different things you can do with that. So having that per account, I like it a lot. It just makes it easy to understand and you can attribute value per user.
Are you getting into any type of personality assessments with this? Like, are you— is it a DiSC profile approach? Or, you know, what, what type of ideas are you doing around, like, where do you— where's this person land that you're selling to? And where's this person land that, that for you that day, are you that How does it match up? Are you doing anything?
Yeah, yeah, I think that's what I like about our approach. We've done some work with DiSC already with a couple of coaching firms actually, and the nice thing about that is really for that to work well, the digital human, particularly if you're trying to assess who's across the table from you, right, and you're trying to obviously understand that through the lens of DiSC, One of the good things is the digital humans, their personalities, everything changes in line with what you've designed for that role play, for that scenario. So now you're actually like, is this person a D? Like, what am I dealing with here? Right? And so those kind of things are very evident through how they express themselves and the way they communicate. So instead of like you having to read through a whole lot of, you know, examples of things. Now you can experience it and then you can experience the contrast between each of, you know, the different DISC profiles.
So, so how big is the company now? Are you VC funded? Tell me a little bit about where you're at in the cycle of growing.
Yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of timing, you know, like we did start this technology very, very early before AI was cool. So we've been around 10 years now as an organization. And so yeah, we have VC funding throughout the business. We're actually profitable as a business now. So in that journey led to last few years now starting to build profit in the business, which is great. It's a different world we live in now. And then yeah, our company is 50 people. We're not large, but We're a company that has embraced AI significantly, not just in our own products, but how we've built everything from the ground up to be highly efficient and profitable, as I said. So we're on a good track. I think we're still really aggressive for growth right now. So we see this as such a great opportunity to lead the market, and particularly in this digital human and training space. And bringing that together. So that's what we're all in on right now.
What's some notable clients you can mention on this?
Yeah, well, some of our, you know, really public ones, people might have seen us with Qatar Airways recently. We're just all over the place on Deutsche Telekom launching their digital human experiences with Mia. We do a lot with Dell Technologies. We're actually hoping to share some pretty cool case studies in the coming months around working across their entire sales force and using this technology. So some, some pretty cool things to come. But yeah, we're primarily in the larger enterprise market, but we do work with some of the smaller medium businesses. It's just got to be a good fit for everyone.
But yeah, what's the average cost per user if you can share that?
Yeah, we, we'd normally sitting around roughly about $500 a year per user.
Per user.
But that's not—
you probably have to set up a lot of the training and there's a bunch of LLM and AI gathering, right?
It includes everything. So it's just designed to make everything simple. So again, you've got all your AI third-party technologies as well as ours all encompassed in a product that really just is designed designed to take all the friction out and help you just focus on, obviously, as a sales rep, just training and using it. And it's engagement or learning development team or sales enablement team that you can just create simulations, run data reports, integrate simply into existing systems.
So you have a HubSpot Salesforce, you're like API.
So many integrations, the API stack on this because you might be running your own analytics engines and BI so we can feed into that. So you can be comparing real-world results to practice outputs to different things. So you can start creating some pretty smart trends across what's going to predict performance and what are the behaviors and what are some of the things that you need to focus on both on training but also maybe even practice, right? Creating new scenarios and in different levels of, um, of competency that you need to see.
And who should, who should they reach out to at your company if they want more information about signing up and getting some, some, some solutions from you guys?
Yeah, I mean, the website's definitely the best place. The team are really active there, so you can go straight to the website, say you want a demo or you want a free trial, and, uh, and you'll have someone contacting you within the hour. To get that all going.
Is there an email address of either you or sales@ or, or one of your star leaders in sales?
Yeah, you can. I mean, Owen's a great person to connect to. It's owenb@unique.com and the website is www.unique.com.
Awesome. Thanks, Danny. I also want to mention, um, the sponsor of today is Full Throttle Falato Leads. Somehow, I don't know how they got here, but Full Throttle Leaders is, is a, is one of our podcasts, and Full Throttle Falato Leads is my company that does lead generation. So if anybody wants to reach out to Michael Falato, which is me, we do these podcasts, emails, LinkedIn roundtables, masterminds, scraping of of intent data, and we'd love to work with you as well. It's Michael at Full Throttle Falato Leads dot com. And thanks again, Daniel. It was a great conversation. If you don't know us, you got to say Hook 'Em Horns before you leave and take care.
