Nuance Labs
Nuance Labs is building the first human foundation model that understands and expresses emotion in real-time, across speech, facial expression, and body language.
THE MISSING LAYER IN AI
Our Mission
Today’s virtual AI experiences fall short of genuine presence.
Our vision is to create emotionally intelligent conversational AI that feel as natural to engage with as a human. We believe that the path across the uncanny valley lies in interaction: the give-and-take that makes conversation feel alive.
This is why Nuance Labs is building a real-time human foundation model that brings emotional intelligence to voice, face, and body, enabling AI to engage with humans through the same signals we use to communicate with each other.
Our Approach
Auto-regressive transformers can be trained to model people.
Consider the overwhelming success of today’s LLMs: by simply predicting one token at a time they learn the semantic complexities of human language. Similarly, we believe that by predicting how humans will act, one visual and audio frame at a time, will produce a deeper and more nuanced understanding of being human.
We are building a unified system that can both appropriately express and empathetically interpret the subtle and meaningful landscape of human communication, in real-time.
ABOUT NUANCE
Our Team
Deep research expertise, real-world product execution, funded by tier-1 VCs
We’re research scientists who’ve spent years advancing AI avatar and audio-visual generation — publishing at top conferences and shipping ultra-low-latency ML products to millions. We combine frontier research with the ruthless engineering needed for consumer-grade, real-time systems.
We recently closed a $10M seed round, backed by Accel, South Park Commons, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, alongside a world-class group of angel investors.
Fangchang Ma
CEO
PhD in Robotics/Machine Learning from MIT; previously an Engineering Manager at Apple. Published in NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, ICRA, and IROS, with 2400+ citations.
Edward Zhang
CTO
PhD in Computer Graphics from the University of Washington; previously a Senior Research Scientist at Apple and tech lead on neural rendering research. Published in CVPR and SIGGRAPH, with 400+ citations.
Karren Yang
Founding Research Scientist
PhD in Audio-visual synthesis from MIT; previously a Senior Research Scientist at Apple, with experience at Niantic Labs, Meta Reality Labs, Bosch Center for AI, and Adobe Research. Published in top AI conferences with 1800+ citations.
Claudia Vanea
Research Fellow
PhD in AI for Health from Oxford. Published in Nature Communications and NeurIPS. Deep expertise in using AI to extract meaningful and subtle signals in complex human-centric data.
Careers
We’re a small, fast-moving research team, based in Seattle.
We have an exceedingly high bar — bringing on only the very best talent. Every member has massive ownership, deep trust, and the opportunity to shape both the technology and the company from the ground up.
Cultural Values
Doing right by people — integrity and respect aren’t negotiable.
Transparency — we communicate openly and share context so everyone can make informed decisions.
Relentless speed — we bias toward action, iterate fast, and learn quickly.
In-person collaboration — the best ideas and strongest teams happen face-to-face. Being together fuels our energy, accelerates problem-solving, and sparks creativity.
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Nuance Labs