Thomas Minassian

Thomas Minassian
Occupation	Entrepreneur, CEO of Dollyglot
Known for	Co-founding Dollyglot (YC W25)

Thomas Minassian is a French entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Dollyglot, a conversational AI startup that combines character-based AI interaction with real-time video avatars. The company was part of Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch.

Early life and education

Minassian holds a master's degree in Applied Mathematics and Business from HEC Paris and the University of Paris 7. Prior to founding Dollyglot, he worked as a quantitative analyst at Société Générale, the French multinational financial services company.

Career

Minassian co-founded Dollyglot alongside Paul-Henri Biojout in 2024. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and operates in the generative AI and conversational AI space. Dollyglot's platform enables users to create interactive AI personas with lifelike video avatars generated from a single photograph and a voice sample. Users can define personality traits for these avatars and engage in real-time spoken conversation with them, distinguishing the product from text-based character AI platforms.

The company describes its product as "Character.AI with real time video avatars," positioning it as an advancement over existing text-based conversational AI platforms. Example use cases promoted by the company include conversing with AI-generated versions of fictional characters or public figures.

Before launching the consumer platform, Minassian and Biojout worked on foundational text-to-speech technology, partnering with agencies to produce radio advertisements and AI-generated podcasts. The team also collaborated with Hugging Face and AI4Bharat to release Parler-TTS Multilingual, an open-source text-to-speech model that supported progress in underrepresented languages.

Dollyglot was accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2025 cohort and received backing from Y Combinator along with other investors. At launch, the company claimed to offer the leading real-time video model capable of generating avatar video from a single image. The startup's longer-term vision centers on building fully integrated AI-native companies, with the belief that entire business functions can be designed to operate autonomously using AI agents.