Andreessen Horowitz(a16z) announced its latest investment in Character AI, a software development firm responsible for creating the Character AI chatbot.
The funding round for this project was a series A round that totaled $150 million and was headed by a16z. Other investors who participated in this funding round include Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, SV Angel, and A Capital.
We are leading the Series A for @character_ai—a proprietary LLM to create and chat with AI characters capable of humor, insight, and more.
— a16z (@a16z) March 23, 2023
Founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas are long-time pioneers in conversational AI.
More from @sarahdingwang: https://t.co/cqxaYvSHk4
Along with the investment in Character AI, Andreessen Horowitz’s general partner Sarah Wang will join the Character AI board.
"Character.AI has trained their proprietary LLM from scratch, enabling their product to optimize for not only raw intelligence, but also a conversational empathy that captures and holds the consumer’s attention with humor, emotion, insight, and more." Sarah Wang, the General Partner of a16z, wrote in a blog post.
About Character AI
Character AI is a web application that was created by Noam Shazeer and Daniel Freitas, who are both former software engineers at Google. It was launched in September 2022 and is designed to generate text responses using pre-programmed character chatbots. Shazeer and Freitas hold the positions of CEO and President, respectively, at Character AI.
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