Character.AI
FeaturedTalk to anyone. Real or imagined.
Founded in 2021 by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, two former Google engineers who worked on the original LaMDA language model, Character.AI was built to democratize access to personalized AI conversations. The platform allows users to create AI characters with distinct personalities, knowledge, and conversational styles, and to chat with characters created by other users. Character.AI reached 20 million daily active users faster than any consumer AI product in history, driven largely by a Gen Z user base that uses it for entertainment, emotional support, language learning, and creative writing. In 2023, the company raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation and in 2024 raised $2.7 billion at a $5 billion valuation from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Google.
Active Founders
Noam Shazeer
Founder / CEO
Noam Shazeer is the co-founder and CEO of Character.AI. He is one of the most important AI researchers of the modern era, having co-authored the Attention Is All You Need paper at Google that introduced the Transformer architecture. He also invented the Mixture of Experts architecture and was a key contributor to Google's LaMDA and PaLM language models. Noam left Google to co-found Character.AI after becoming frustrated with the slow pace of product development at large corporations.
Daniel De Freitas
Co-Founder
Daniel De Freitas is the co-founder of Character.AI. He worked alongside Noam Shazeer on Google's LaMDA project, building the conversational AI system that would become the foundation for much of Google's AI product work. Daniel's expertise in conversational AI systems and his deep understanding of what makes AI interactions feel natural and engaging have been central to Character.AI's remarkably sticky user experience.
Character.AI