Character Technologies, Inc.

Character Technologies, Inc., operating as Character.AI, is an AI company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It was founded in 2021 by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, both former Google engineers who worked on large language model research, including contributions to the Transformer architecture and LaMDA. The company's core product is a web and mobile platform that allows users to create, customize, and interact with AI-driven personas through open-ended dialogue.

Character.AI's platform hosts millions of user-created characters spanning entertainment, education, companionship, and role-playing use cases. Users can build characters with defined personalities and backstories, and the platform supports multi-character conversations. The service attracted a large consumer audience, particularly among younger demographics, and became one of the most-visited AI consumer applications in the world by session time metrics in 2023.

The company raised a $150 million Series A round in March 2023 at a $1 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz. It subsequently raised additional funding, bringing total disclosed funding to approximately $693 million. In 2024, Google entered into a licensing agreement with Character.AI and hired back Shazeer and De Freitas, though the company continued to operate independently under Shazeer, who returned as CEO.