Most founders come to their project through their passion. Dan Thomson, founder and CEO of Sensay is one such person. He has a diverse academic background, combining technology and philosophy, and ended up writing a couple of books based on the concept of the mind, uploading digital immortality and essentially exploring a form of life extension as a way of processing his own existential crisis.
“I was struggling to find a reason for ambition and motive, pushing through my work, and thinking how small we can be without believing in any particular god or afterlife – I think without the latter we can really find it hard to have purpose.”
As a result, Sensay grew into the concept of preserving people’s personality and character and capturing them using AI and blockchain technology, converting one version of a person into infinite versions of themselves. These digital replication simulations only really become possible with the explosion of AI.
“Another driver is the loss of people after a couple of generations. You might know the names of your grandparents but typically not much else other than family stories and even that kind of storytelling is becoming lost.”
Thomson holds up the example of how people are very curious nowadays about their ancestors resulting in companies like 23andme and Ancestry becoming very popular.
“We began to imagine if we could take all the digital data about people – videos, photos, emails etc – there is a huge amount of data we could use to generate a credible simulation. There is a pattern to the way people speak and how they interact with the world – and we can use AI to build that person.”
While the platform is in Beta there are 20,000 users and counting, purely from word of mouth. In addition to individual people, the team is also putting together realistic digital versions of celebrities, historical figures and even fictional characters such as Mr Grey.
Thomson is bootstrapping the project along with two co-founders which he admits is not as much fun as it was in his 20s. As a result, they are looking for token sales to generate funding, with different rounds at different prices and each stage lasting three weeks. All up they had hoped to raise between $1 and $2 million from their community, in the end, there was incredible demand for the project, driving funding to $3.4m.
Thomson sees his current token sale as being very different from those of the ICOs back in 2017.
“We are doing serious risk management for starters with not one but two sets of top-quality auditors checking the contracts and details. We also have a working product which is much more than many of the ICOs before.
“We are also serious about the utility of the token which is not a copy of something on another chain but designed for our own niche.”
The actual token is hidden in the backend and the users do not need to buy it to get access to the platform. Access will be via standard subscriptions in Fiat, Stablecoins, and the Sensay Token. Once users have access, they can build a replica which they can be tradable in the future if desired, which is more usual in the case of celebrities or historical figures. These internal transactions will be finalized with the Sensay token inside the platform.
Thomson is skeptical of airdrops and believes instead of using the native token as a reward token instead for people helping, being part of the community or undertaking activities to support the project.
“We are building for the long term, so we started out with a fair valuation well below what we’ll be asking for in the long term, so as to reward the early supporters. So, we expect to see a nice gradual increase, proportional to the technology we are actually developing.”
As to the risk of the native token being deemed a security, Thomson says he has really good legal advice from a top-notch legal firm.
