HourOne founder Oren Aharon reflects on winning this year’s startup competition at UNLEASH America 2023. Already a market leader in AI video tech, HourOne has big plans, as Aharon explains…
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What inspired you to develop HourOne and what gap does it fill in the HR tech landscape?
HourOne helps an employee create its own virtual human and put it to work on their behalf. By that, it’s helping the company to better communicate internally and externally, about the product, about procedures, about capabilities of that company and therefore, increasing the scale and exposure of that company.
What’s the progress been like since launch?
Our product is based on real people and customers can come in in a freemium mode and register and start creating content. And then obviously our growth strategy – we have business and enterprise grade plans.
Today, we have thousands of customers ranging from five people in a company to 50k people in the company, all of them creating content with our platforms.
How do you stay ahead of the competition?
HourOne leads the market with generative AI and virtual humans. Basically, we have the highest quality and the best product in the market today. We are already doing generative AI-to-text, text-to-image, text-to-video, virtual humans, 3-D environments, indoor/outdoor. So actually, we are already leading the tech.
And the idea is just to grow and expand. This innovation is based on our 35 tech engineers that are based in our office, doing ground breaking research and building our own virtual human foundational models, capturing 1000s of people already through the system and turning them into virtual humans in a training environment.
What’s the most rewarding part of seeing your solution in action?
The most rewarding part is to see that people actually use it, and the feedback is amazing. You see 1000s of people every day coming in creating videos and getting very positive reactions. So that’s the most beneficial part of it.
What would you say to people who are critical or skeptical of AI?
These are two different subjects. First of all, a lot of things are hype, and this is currently the hype because of generative AI. But we’ve been here for the past five years, and we’ve built the most comprehensive guarantee value product in the market today. No way to argue about that. But the idea is to build a product and not just to be hype.
And regarding the second part, nobody’s here to steal any job. One of the interesting parts of our product is that the person who’s creating content of themselves is still involved in the creation. So it’s not fully automated, someone needs to drive the prompt. And this is the creator with their own face and voice, creating something that they like, eventually bringing their personality to the content.
