Will Character AI become an investor darling?

Will Character AI become an investor darling?

San Francisco, 1/31/2023

Character AI, a developer of celebrity-based AI chatbots, is seeking to raise up to $250 million in funding that would value the startup at $1 billion or more. Character is in early discussions with Sequoia Capital and other top venture capital firms to capitalize on the generative AI hype.

Character was founded by former Google researchers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who worked on the tech giant’s LaMDA AI conversational technology.

They left Google to create and release a LaMDA-based language model chatbot web application. That’s why Character’s website offers various AI chatbots based on the system.

Users can chat with virtual versions of famous people like Queen Elizabeth, Elon Musk, William Shakespeare, Donald Trump and Walter White from Breaking Bad.

Character’s technology, which is currently free while the startup analyzes user interactions, is considered a competitor to ChatGPT. The $250 million it plans to raise is a large sum for a startup that has only released a beta product, according to The Information.

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