Persona Studios: Our Origin Story
Company
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31 thg 3, 2025
🚀 Our Vision: Elevate, Automate, Innovate
Elevating our users from everyday tasks to extraordinary possibilities.
💡 The Spark: Recognizing the AI Gap
Persona Studios was founded in early 2023 by Kevin Davis and Andrew McCrow during Antler's startup incubator in Singapore. Recognizing AI as the next big wave in technology, Kevin observed that many new AI startups were facing similar challenges.
“There were companies building AI marketing assistants, AI interior designers, AI mental health coaches, and I could go on. It seemed to me that everyone was trying to solve common problems, such as how to connect their AI assistants across various channels, how to ensure easy and reliable training, how to add multi-lingual capabilities, how to use AI technology to connect to external systems and trigger next actions, etc.”
🤝 A Shared Mission: From Real Estate to AI
Andrew, with over 10 years of experience in business travel and real estate, was exploring an AI assistant to assist property owners to manage their real estate portfolios. This shared interest in AI led them to collaborate and pitch the concept of Persona Studios to Antler, securing initial investment in April 2023.
“I was looking into starting a real estate business that would help owners rent and manage their properties on a short term basis to business and leisure travellers. Of course I was very interested in using AI to automate a lot of the routine property management tasks and was fascinated to hear from Kevin about his concept of building a platform that would enable users to easily create, deploy and manage AI assistants - or personas - across various use cases.”
🏡 The Hacker House: Where Ideas Became Reality
To develop their vision, Kevin and Andrew rented a "Hacker House" in Vung Tau, on the coast of Vietnam, where they were joined by their CTO, Van. After three months of development, they launched their first persona, an AI travel assistant, capable of planning travel itineraries via Facebook Messenger and SMS. This milestone facilitated further investment in August 2023, led by AVV, with participation from 500 Startups and Antler, enabling the expansion of their development team and the establishment of an office in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
“As someone who was already toying with AI technology it was very obvious to me that AI was the next big wave of technology so I was very excited to join Kevin, Andrew, and the Persona Studios team who were one of the most innovative AI start-ups in SouthEast Asia”
⚙️ Building the Future: AI That Works for You
Throughout 2024, Persona Studios focused on refining their platform, building out several features such as:
Integration across multiple communication channels, including a web widget, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Slack, Discord and SMS.
Support for voice and text in over 30 languages.
A "chat hijack" feature allowing live user interactions.
Comprehensive training and retraining tools.
A dashboard providing access to conversation transcripts and analytics.
We also identified a recurring issue of "AI drift" where AI assistants lose focus during extended interactions which was especially problematic for longer conversations like interviews or training sessions. This led us to develop the concept of Agendas. Agendas allow users to break up complex tasks into smaller steps and keep their Persona conversations on rails. To build out this functionality, additional funding was secured in March 2024 from Iterative Ventures.
🚀 What’s Next? AI That Just Works
Today, Persona Studios offers a no-code solution enabling users to create AI assistants - or personas - that automate repetitive conversations, staying true to our long-term vision of building a platform that allows users to rise above everyday tasks to pursue new, extraordinary possibilities.
👥 Meet the Founders… or AI Clones of Them!
Want to find out more? Chat with AI clones of Kevin and Andrew to build your own persona or book a demo today!
