Startup secured $6.3M funding on November 21st, 2024
Have you ever needed a specialist, coach, or trainer, but they were too busy to answer your question? For example, you bought an online course, had a question, but didn’t have time to wait for the instructor to go through tons of emails and finally respond? Then this project is for you!
Core Idea
Amigo was founded in October 2023. However, it only went public a few months ago, immediately announcing the attraction of its first $6.3 million in investments. The startup offers experts the opportunity to "scale their expertise and change more lives" by creating a clone that the user (expert) can develop on the startup's platform.
Amigo's target audience consists of coaches, consultants, mentors, and educators. But why would they need a clone? It's simple. First, clients can receive advice from the clone between live sessions and consultations or request assistance when they urgently need help. Second, it is possible to create a separate product where clients purchase consultations and advice from the clone instead of the live expert—this is much cheaper and allows experts to expand their audience by reaching people who cannot afford the full price of their services. After all, bread is made up of crumbs, right? Third, these clones can explain and answer questions about written books and online courses on behalf of the expert, saving time and optimizing work resources.
Another advantage is that the clone can communicate in almost any language, significantly expanding the potential audience and enabling services for a greater number of people by overcoming language barriers.
The main challenge for coaches, consultants, and educators is the inability to scale their business because they physically cannot serve more clients with high quality.
This forces in-demand experts to raise their prices in order to earn more from the limited number of clients they can serve. As a result, experienced consultants can charge $1,000 per hour, while coaches may charge up to $3,000 per hour. Consequently, experts lose the opportunity to help a large number of people who critically need their assistance but cannot afford such fees, or they face course capacity limitations, which is also a common issue.
The key feature of Amigo is that the clones created on its platform are not just "parrots" that simply mimic an expert’s speech. According to the developers, they can replicate the expert’s thinking, communication style, reactions, and behavior. And that is precisely why Amigo secured investments and is betting on the success of its platform.
Fun Facts & Highlights
Amigo claims that the clones created on its platform are fundamentally different from regular AI bots, which generate responses by compiling expert phrases from existing texts. According to Amigo, its clones "capture and replicate the essence of an expert," including reproducing their patterns of critical thinking and problem-solving approaches. Additionally, Amigo promises that its clones can replicate the expert's overall methodology and session structure, mimic their unique communication style, articulate concepts that the expert has never explicitly formulated, and reframe general knowledge for specific contexts.
Amigo even asserts that its clones can imitate the expert's intuition—something the expert themselves might not be able to express in explicit statements or scientific explanations. To achieve this, the startup has designed and implemented its own AI training and application architecture, called MENTOR. The platform’s goal is not just to absorb the expert’s knowledge but to understand how they think, process information, and structure their work with clients.
As a result, training a clone is less about feeding it lectures and more akin to a master teaching an apprentice—passing on an understanding of the world rather than just a set of specific facts and techniques. The time required to train a clone depends on the complexity of the expertise and the amount of time the expert can dedicate to the process. On average, it takes 4–6 weeks with training sessions lasting 3–4 hours each.
Clients can interact with the clone by a text chat, and there is also a voice chat mode, making communication even more seamless. The pricing model for using a clone is currently determined individually, but it includes a fixed subscription fee and a small percentage of the income generated through the clone’s use. Additionally, Amigo offers marketing support for products utilizing its clones, helping refine its algorithms and continuously improve the platform’s effectiveness across different industries.
Where Are We Runnin'?
A similar product, the startup Personal AI, has also developed a platform that allows people to create their own digital clones.
The founder of Personal AI initially envisioned these clones as personal assistants—helping users take notes, set reminders, simplify the search for products or services, organize meetings, and optimize schedules. However, Personal AI recently pivoted toward the corporate market, offering businesses the ability to create digital clones of their most successful employees.
That being said, We are still believe that the most promising market for these AI clones lies in education and adjacent fields like coaching and consulting. When creating corporate clones, the primary focus is on replicating functional skills rather than personal characteristics.
What’s particularly fascinating is that these AI systems extract knowledge not from textbooks or traditional sources but directly from people—an idea that feels straight out of early 2000s science fiction. This is especially relevant for fields that blend science and art, such as marketing or design, where raw information alone isn’t enough—you also need creative thinking.
But there’s a crucial catch—these AI-driven clones require a far more sophisticated mechanism than most existing AI models. They need an additional layer: the creation of an internal model of the expert. Instead of just using a dataset of raw information, the AI needs to construct a nuanced representation of the expert’s thinking patterns, which can then be applied to real-world tasks.
The broadest and most practical applications for such advanced AI clones align with Amigo’s vision—coaching, consulting, and education. In other words, the “info-business” industry in its widest sense—both the good and the bad. Here, people typically pay not just for formal knowledge but for access to a specific expert's insights, problem-solving approach, and personal experience.
Without a doubt, this is a huge and highly profitable market. If methods like those used by Amigo can effectively clone expert thinking, this technology could see massive adoption, making it a highly attractive investment opportunity.