Empathy is the
missing piece of
artificial intelligence

Nuance Labs is building the first human foundation model that understands and expresses emotion in real-time, across speech, facial expression, and body language.

Join the team

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FRONTIER

Bridging the emotional gap in artificial intelligence

Today’s virtual AI experiences fall short of genuine presence. Our vision is to create emotionally intelligent AI that feels as natural to engage with as a human.

Crossing the uncanny valley

Today’s AI feels emotionally flat and robotic. We are building technology that makes AI feel realistic.

Crossing the uncanny valley

Today’s AI feels emotionally flat and robotic. We are building technology that makes AI feel realistic.

Fostering two way interactions that feel truly alive

We believe the key to unlocking emotionally intelligent AI lies in interaction: the real-time, give-and-take that makes conversations feel alive.

Fostering two way interactions that feel truly alive

We believe the key to unlocking emotionally intelligent AI lies in interaction: the real-time, give-and-take that makes conversations feel alive.

Unifying voice, face and body

We are building a unified system that can appropriately express and empathetically interpret the subtle and meaningful landscape of human communication.

Unifying voice, face and body

We are building a unified system that can appropriately express and empathetically interpret the subtle and meaningful landscape of human communication.

Imagine an AI that can understand a quirked eyebrow, a shift in tone, or a hesitant pause, and respond in a way that feels truly human.

Our Team

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.

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.

PhD in Robotics/Machine Learning from MIT; previously research scientist and manager at Apple.

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.

PhD in Computer Graphics from the University of Washington; previously research scientist at Apple.

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.

PhD in Audio-visual Synthesis from MIT; previously research scientist at Apple.

Claudia Vanea

Founding Research Scientist

PhD in AI for Health from Oxford. Published in Nature Communications and NeurIPS. Previously founder at South Park Commons.

PhD in AI for Health from Oxford. Former founder at South Park Commons.

Nicole Zhen

Chief of Staff

Economics from Yale; previously management consulting at McKinsey & Company, and enterprise strategy and growth at Nordstrom.

Rajath Kumar

Founding Research Scientist

Master's in Electrical Engineering from Columbia; previously a research scientist at Amazon AGI.

Master's in Electrical Engineering from Columbia; previously research scientist at Amazon AGI.

Elliott Bartsch

Founding Engineer

Statistics from Harvard; previously a Staff ML Engineer and Senior Manager at Discord, leading ML for safety. Early employee at Day Zero Diagnostics and Firecracker, both acquired.

Statistics from Harvard; previously ML Engineer and Senior Manager at Discord.

Soyong Shin

Founding Research Scientist

PhD in Human-centric Computer Vision from Carnegie Mellon; previously a visiting researcher at Meta FAIR.

PhD in Human-centric Computer Vision from Carnegie Mellon; previously visiting researcher at Meta FAIR.

Yaser Sheikh

Advisor

Former VP of Codec Avatars at Meta and Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

We’re hiring!

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 ground up.

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