Hour One

The product: turning a person into a virtual character

Hour One was founded in 2019 by Oren Aharon, Lior Hakim and Arnon Kahani, and operated from Tel Aviv and New York. Its idea was a "virtual twin": a real person is filmed in a short session, and the system creates a digital character from that footage that looks and sounds like them. From then on, the character can be driven by text alone, in any language, and placed in roles such as a receptionist, a salesperson, an HR representative or a language teacher. According to the company, the people who lent their likeness could earn passive income every time their twin appeared in commercial content.

What production looks like in practice

In 2023 Aharon described a simpler process: a six-second video from a phone is enough to start, and the system supports 80 languages. Anyone who does not want their own character can choose one of tens of thousands of ready-made characters. The main use was inside companies: training videos for sales teams, marketing videos and product explainers. According to Aharon, the company then served 1,300 business customers, including Intel, HPE and T-Mobile, a figure provided by the company itself. On the same occasion he estimated that within 24 months it would be hard to tell a real person apart from a character created by AI.

The funding round and what investors saw in it

In April 2022 Hour One raised a $20 million Series A led by Insight Partners, with funds including Galaxy Interactive, Remagine Ventures and Kindred Ventures. The company announced at the time that it would triple its headcount in New York and Tel Aviv. Lonne Jaffe of Insight Partners described the vision this way: you type text, and behind the scenes a seamless, realistic video of a talking character is created with matching voice and graphics, and the goal is to embed this capability in every software product or run it in real time through a programming interface.

The Wix acquisition

In May 2025 Wix announced that it had acquired Hour One. According to Wix's announcement, at the core of the product was cloud infrastructure that combines running generative models with advanced 3D rendering. Ronny Elkayam, Wix's chief operating officer, explained that bringing the capabilities in-house would allow better control of quality, less dependence on outside vendors and better management of costs, and stressed that this was also the acquisition of a team of experts. The founders and the company's employees joined Wix headquarters. The deal amount was not given in the published announcements.

The context: the talking avatar market

Hour One was one of several companies that developed digital presenters for business video, a field that also includes the Israeli company D-ID and Synthesia. Alongside the benefits, the technology raises questions the whole field faces: who holds the rights to a person's likeness, how to label a video that was not filmed, and how to prevent the use of a likeness without consent. Hour One's model, in which the filmed person gives consent and is paid, was one possible answer.