AI chatbot developer Character.ai has secured a $200M to $250M investment that values the startup at roughly $1B, according to the Financial Times.

 

AI chatbot developer Character.ai has secured a $200M to $250M investment that values the startup at roughly $1B, according to the Financial Times.   The funding round was led by Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. 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 publicly release a language model chatbot web application that's based on LaMDA. Character's website offers various AI chatbots built on the system. Users can chat with virtual versions of famous figures such as Queen Elizabeth, Elon Musk, William Shakespeare, Donald Trump, and Walter White of "Breaking Bad."