“Alphabet’s Google is in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI, as the fast growing artificial intelligence chatbot startup seeks capital to train model and keep up with user demand, two sources briefed on the matter,” said Reuters.
“The investment, which could be structured as convertible notes, according to a third source, will deepen the existing partnership Character.AI already has with Google, in which it uses Google’s cloud services and Tensor Processing Units(TPUs) to train models.”
It was founded by former Google employees Daniel De Freitas and Naom Shazeer, who said, “Character.AI allows people to chat with virtual versions of celebrities like Billie Eilish or anime characters, while creating their own chatbots and AI assistants. It is free to use, but offers subscription model that charges $9.99 a month fore users who want to skip the virtual line to access a chatbot.”
They further said, “Character.AI’s chatbots, with various roles and tones to choose from, have appealed to users aged 18 to 24, who contributed about 60% of its website traffic, according to data from Similarweb. The demographic is helping the company position itself as the surveyor of more fun personal AI companions, compared to other AI chatbots from OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.” “The company previously said its website had attracted 100 million monthly visits in the first six months since its launch. Character.AI is also in talks to raise equity funding from venture capital investors, which could value the company at over $5 billion,” as per a source. “In March, it raised $150 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $1 billion valuation.”
