Soul Machines went into receivership and was sold to AppDirect: what happens to your digital people, and what to do now

Digital human (Soul Machines calls these Digital People): a lifelike animated AI character that talks with people face to face on a screen, usually built for a brand.

Receivership: a process in which a receiver appointed by secured lenders takes control of a company's assets, often to sell the business.

Timeless AI™ Twin: a professional's AI twin, built from the professional's own Persona, that answers in the first person on a website, through an API and inside AI assistants over MCP.

Executor Lock™: Idy's patent-pending system of named executors, Trusted Contacts, a verified death report and a sealed snapshot of your Persona that can never be changed.

Soul Machines went from receivership to a sale in under eight months. On February 5, 2026, Leon Bowker and Luke Norman of KPMG were appointed joint and several receivers of Soul Machines Limited, over all of the company's present and future assets, and the appointment was published in the New Zealand Gazette on February 10 (New Zealand Gazette). On September 28, 2026, AppDirect announced that it had acquired Soul Machines, without disclosing the terms (SiliconANGLE, September 28, 2026). AppDirect presented the deal the next day at Thrive, its conference in Los Angeles, where it confirmed that Soul Machines will run as a wholly owned subsidiary (Channel Buzz, October 1, 2026).

Soul Machines is still operating, and no announcement has said that existing deployments will be switched off. What has changed is who stands behind the contract, where the technology is heading and how much leverage each customer has at renewal. The dated record below runs from the company's founding to the sale, and the rest of this guide helps customers manage all three changes. Every price on this page is in US dollars.

Soul Machines is a New Zealand company that builds human-like digital people, animated AI characters that talk with customers and staff face to face on a screen. Greg Cross and Mark Sagar founded the company in 2016 (TechNode Global, February 18, 2022), and it began as a University of Auckland spin-out built on Baby X, an interactive animated infant that Sagar's research team created at the university (Global Venturing, November 24, 2016). Sagar had already won two Scientific and Engineering Academy Awards, one shared in 2010 for the Light Stage facial capture and rendering system used on films such as Spider-Man 2 and Avatar (USC Institute for Creative Technologies), and one in 2011 for his facial motion retargeting work (fxguide). Coverage of the sale described avatars that "see, listen, react and remember interactions", used for customer support and self-service, learning and development, training, employee help desks and digital commerce (SiliconANGLE, September 28, 2026).

The company raised serious money and won serious customers. In February 2022 SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $70 million Series B1, with Temasek, Salesforce Ventures and Horizons Ventures among the existing investors taking part, which took total funding to $135 million. TechNode named Carmelo Anthony, Nestle Toll House, P&G, Twitch, the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization among the brands and celebrities Soul Machines worked with, and reported the company's plan to launch "hyper-realistic digital twins of real life celebrities". That a company of that standing reached receivership four years later shows how quickly the digital human market moved, and why every customer should read the contract behind its digital people now.

Soul Machines Studio is the company's self-serve tool for developers, which its homepage describes as "the developer destination for building experiences from scratch or testing custom integrations", with a seven-day free trial (Soul Machines, checked October 2, 2026). The homepage also sells Digital Workforce, for deploying human-like AI agents into business roles, and Workforce Connect, an app for placing those digital workers inside the workflow tools a company already uses. On the day we checked, the homepage did not yet mention AppDirect. Digital people and custom avatars built on the platform fall inside the "Soul Machines Work" that the standard terms say Soul Machines owns, which is why the ownership section below matters to every Studio customer.

Soul Machines went into receivership because its secured lenders, acting through a security trustee, appointed receivers over all of the company's assets. The Gazette notice records that Bartok International Limited made the appointment as security trustee for the secured parties under a convertible note deed poll, using a general security deed in its favor dated June 21, 2024 (New Zealand Gazette). A receiver appointed this way takes control of the secured assets on behalf of the lenders, and a sale of the business is a common outcome. Neither the receivers nor the buyer has published a fuller explanation.

The public record from 2023 and 2024 shows the pressure building. The NZ Herald reported in July 2024 that Greg Cross had stepped down as chief executive in September 2023, that Mark Sagar had left in June 2024, that staff numbers had fallen from 253 to 70 in a year, and that Bartok International had tripled its stake to just under a third of the company (NZ Herald, July 28, 2024). The same report said the company's accounts for the year to March 31, 2023 carried a going-concern warning, and that early customers including Air New Zealand, ANZ and Mercedes-Benz had stopped using the technology. For customers today, what matters is the result, which is a new owner and contracts that can move with the business.

AppDirect, a San Francisco company that runs a cloud marketplace for business technology with billing and provisioning, bought Soul Machines, and it has raised about $511 million from investors (Dealroom, September 28, 2026). "Soul Machines helps us take the next step in making AI more useful and more accessible for businesses," said Nicolas Desmarais, AppDirect's chairman and chief executive (SiliconANGLE). SiliconANGLE reported that the avatars will soon be available in apps built in Devs.ai, which it described as an enterprise vibe-coding platform powered by AppDirect that lets developers build apps and agents. Channel Buzz reported from Thrive that Soul Machines will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary and that its digital people and more than 40 "LLM-agnostic AI advisors" are going into Devs.ai (Channel Buzz).

Customers should read the plan as a change of direction. A product sold as a branded digital human is becoming one capability inside a larger AI platform, so roadmaps, pricing, support and data flows can all change at renewal. Customers who ask their questions now, in writing, negotiate from the strongest position they will have, and the checklist below gives them the questions.

Soul Machines customers' digital people stay governed by the standard terms they signed, and those terms give Soul Machines the ownership, the right to move the contract and the right to destroy customer data after the contract ends. Unless your company negotiated different terms, the clauses below decide what happens next. We read the Terms and Conditions and the Data Retention Policy on October 2, 2026 (Soul Machines terms; Data Retention Policy). Rajesh Beri's analysis for BERI on September 28 reached the same reading and advised customers to confirm the new counterparty in writing, request backups now and renegotiate before renewal (BERI). Clauses like these are common in enterprise software, and a sale is exactly the moment they start to matter.

No, under the standard terms Soul Machines customers do not own their custom avatars, because clause 3.1 places Digital People and Custom Avatars inside the Soul Machines Work that Soul Machines owns. A company that commissioned a branded character holds a license to use the avatar while the contract runs, and must delete the avatar from its own applications when the contract ends. For a brand asset that customers recognize, the face of your service belongs to a supplier that now belongs to someone else. For the ownership question across AI clones in general, read who owns an AI clone made for your business.

Soul Machines customers should secure their data this week, get the new arrangement in writing, and run a replacement pilot in parallel before renewal. The eight steps below follow the order a procurement team would use, with a deadline for each, and they draw on BERI's advice to customers (BERI). Step seven costs least and teaches most, because a Timeless AI™ Twin of one real expert takes an afternoon to build and goes on your website with one line of code. For the build itself, read how to build a digital twin for your business.

A real person's digital twin goes wherever the vendor's contract and data policy send the likeness, unless the person decided otherwise in advance. Soul Machines worked with celebrities such as Carmelo Anthony and in 2022 announced plans for "hyper-realistic digital twins of real life celebrities". Under the standard terms, a digital person built on the platform sits inside the Soul Machines Work, and the Data Retention Policy keeps the facial-feature data of a modeled person "for the life of the commercial and research use" of the model. When the vendor changes hands, the likeness of a real athlete, executive or spokesperson travels with the vendor's assets, and the person behind the face may have no say in where the likeness goes next.

The cases where a real person decided in advance look very different. Darth Vader's voice is the best-known business example, because James Earl Jones agreed in 2022 that Lucasfilm could recreate his voice from archival recordings, and that written decision governed the voice after he died on September 9, 2024 (Wikipedia). A twin built and owned by the person, with an executor the person named, is the business version of that decision. For the ownership law, read who owns an AI clone made for your business and our guide to AI identity governance.

At least seven well-known AI avatar, twin and character products were sold, renamed, shut, frozen or turned to a new market between 2023 and 2026, and Soul Machines is the latest. The pattern runs across startups and the largest platforms alike, which is why a digital person is only as durable as the contract and the company behind it. The right contract and the right architecture survive a sale, and the buyer's checklist further down shows what to ask for.

The best Soul Machines alternative depends on whether you want an invented brand character or the expertise and presence of your real people. If you want an invented avatar for a kiosk, a training roleplay or a support flow, interactive avatar platforms such as UneeQ, Synthesia, HeyGen, D-ID and Tavus serve that scope, and Synthesia alone reached a $4 billion valuation in 2026 and sells interactive roleplay avatars for sales training (TechCrunch, September 26, 2026). If you want customers to meet a named expert they already trust, a Timeless AI™ Twin is built for exactly that. The table describes each option by its scope, with prices from each company's own pricing page on October 2, 2026. For deeper comparisons, read the best digital twin apps compared, the best AI avatar apps and the best AI avatar generators.

A twin of a real person wins because customers trust a named expert more than a brand character, and because the person who owns the knowledge also owns and governs the twin. Your twin answers in the first person, under the person's name and photo, in the person's own words, and visitors who speak hear the person's own cloned voice. The owner reads every conversation, which turns the twin into a live record of what customers ask, and can pause any door at any time. Timeless Terms section 6.1 says "You retain ownership of all content, memories, media, and data you input into the Platform", and section 6.4 says Idy "does not use Your Content to train AI models unless expressly permitted under a separate agreement" (Timeless AI™ Terms of Service). Persona Video adds the face, making video messages in the expert's own face and voice from one 30-second recording, so a welcome on your homepage comes from the real person, and the first video is free. For the full method, read how to make an AI video of yourself.

A Timeless AI™ Twin works by turning one professional's Persona into a twin that answers on three doors, which are your website, any app connected through the API, and the AI assistants people already use, reached over MCP. On the website, the twin appears through one line of code and carries a "Timeless AI™ Twin" badge, and when a visitor asks whether they are talking to a real person, the twin says warmly that the visitor is talking to the professional's Timeless AI™ Twin. Twins are for people 18 and over, and each twin is built only from the owner's own Persona.

Timeless Pro costs $59.99 a month or $599 a year per professional and includes 1,000 replies a month and everything in the Eternal plan. Organizations that want twins for several experts can talk to us through our partnership page. For more, read about the Timeless AI™ Twin, professional AI for founders, CEOs and specialists and, for sole traders, AI for plumbers and electricians.

An expert's Timeless AI™ Twin follows a plan written in advance, because the expert owns the twin and Executor Lock™ decides what happens at death. The expert and the company agree up front which doors the company runs, such as the twin on the company website or inside its staff tools, and what happens to each door if the expert moves on or retires. When an expert dies, the named executors take control after a verified death report, a human review and a seven-day cooling-off, the Persona becomes a sealed snapshot that can never be changed, and the twin continues after the lock where the owner switched that on. A company that settles these points with its experts on the first day keeps their knowledge answering through a planned handover.

Idy, the company behind Timeless AI™, built that governance before building the twin, because a business can only rely on a digital person once ownership, consent and succession are settled. Our first years went into who controls a likeness at work, who decides about the likeness at death, and how consent is recorded so the software obeys the consent. The answer is Executor Lock™, built on technology covered by 78 patents pending, including verified handovers to a named executor, a memory record that becomes permanent at the handover, and keeping a Persona the same person when the underlying AI models change. Idy has also filed two international applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty, and in 2025 filed more standard patent applications than any Australian organization except Aristocrat, ahead of CSIRO and ResMed, according to the national patent office's Australian IP Report 2026. Soul Machines' record shows why that order matters to a business buyer, because under its standard terms the digital people built for brands belonged to the supplier, so a brand's trusted face changed owners when the supplier did. Avatar platforms sell a character and a license to use the character, and none of them asks the person behind a face to name who takes over. For the planning side, read how to capture founder knowledge before it is lost, business continuity planning, key-person insurance explained and whether your AI survives model changes.

Any digital human contract should settle ownership, model training, data return, a change-of-control exit, consent from any real person modeled, conversation records and continuity before you sign. The checklist below works for any vendor, and you can take the table straight to your next renewal meeting. Ask for each item in writing before you renew.

Timeless AI™ answers several of these questions in the terms and the product before anyone negotiates. The owner keeps ownership of all content they put in (Terms s6.1), nothing is used to train AI models except under a separate agreement (s6.4), and the owner reads every conversation and can pause any door at any time. Each twin is built only from the owner's own Persona, by a person 18 or over, and Executor Lock™ gives every twin named executors and a sealed snapshot for the day the person behind the face is gone. For the governance framework behind these questions, read our guides to AI governance and an AI knowledge base for your business, and for every plan, see Timeless AI™ plans and prices.

Soul Machines customers should prepare now and decide at renewal, with a working pilot in hand. The 30-day backup window in clause 7.4 starts at termination, renewal conversations with the new owner are happening this quarter, and a pilot with a twin of a real expert takes an afternoon. A team that arrives at renewal with its data secured and a twin already answering customers has every option open.

1. Put your expert's twin online

2. Build a twin you own, free to start

3. Name your executor

We read the Gazette notice, Soul Machines' terms and data policy, the SiliconANGLE, Dealroom and Channel Buzz reports on the sale, the rest of the coverage linked above, the platforms' pricing pages and our own Terms of Service. Every outside fact links to its source and date.

• how to make an AI version of yourself

• how a twin of your expert turns visitors into clients