Thea Walker and Anton Zaleski stand behind ALYSS, short for Advanced Lifelike Yielding Synthetic Systems. Walker leads the company; Zaleski serves as its chief architect. Together, they are developing a new generation of synthetic companions designed to blur the line between machine intelligence and human presence.

The company’s first fully realized prototype was given the name Alyss. More than a product designation, the name became a symbol of the project itself: the first synthetic companion created to embody ALYSS’s vision of lifelike presence, adaptive intelligence, and emotional interaction.