Generative AI chatbot developer Character.ai raised between $200M to $250M in fresh funding, sources informed The Financial Times.
Character.ai cemented its unicorn status with the new round, valuing the firm at about $1B.
- Chartacter.ai
was founded six months ago by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas,
former Google executives that worked on its conversation LaMDA model.
- The
firm is developing a platform that provides AI-generated responses by
mimicking the conversation style of famous personalities such as Elon
Musk and fictional characters such as Mario.
- Andreessen Horowitz led the funding round.
- Character.ai is the latest startup to capitalize on the surge in AI investment.
- Open AI received a $10B commitment from Microsoft earlier this year.
- Its rival Anthropic raised $300M at a $5B valuation at the start of February 2023.
- Another generative AI startup Cohere is in talks with investors to raise "hundreds of millions of dollars" at over $6B valuation.
- Inflection is eyeing a $675M funding round this year.
