San Francisco | Bloomberg
Character.AI, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup cofounded by Brazilian Daniel de Freitas, is in early negotiations to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in new investments, valuing it at more than $5 billion (April 25). billion R$). , say people familiar with the matter.
The company’s website (beta.character.ai), still in beta, features chatbots that can impersonate anyone or anything.
Character.AI was an early darling in the field of generative artificial intelligence and attracted a lot of interest from investors, said these people, who requested anonymity to discuss private information. Negotiations on the deal are at an early stage and could still fail, it said.
A deal could value the startup at $5 billion to $6 billion, they said. A valuation of up to $10 billion was discussed in early investor discussions, two of the people said. However, even the lower price would still be a big jump from the $1 billion valuation in the company’s last funding round.
A company spokesperson declined to comment on the startup’s valuation, but said Character.AI had reached “significant milestones” after raising $150 million from investors earlier this year.
“As our user community continues to grow rapidly, so does interest in being part of the revolutionary technology we develop and deliver,” he said. “While we continue to have productive conversations, any discussion of our fundraising or valuation is just speculation.”
Character.AI was founded by former Google employees Noam Shazeer and Brazilian Daniel de Freitas. Their service allows people to create a variety of chatbots that can have text conversations. The startup’s users sent tens of millions of messages to characters like Super Mario, based on the video game character. The characters then offer AIgenerated responses, in this case for example: “Hello! It’s me, Mario!” [Olá! Sou eu, Mario!]”
Character.AI was founded in 2021 and is still in its infancy. The business model could evolve. Earlier this year, the company began offering a $10 monthly subscription to a service called c.ai+, giving users faster access to its messaging service.
The startup is one of many developing generative AI, software that takes user input and generates new content such as text or images, such as: B. ChatGPT from OpenAI and Bard from Google.
As the market valuation of AI companies rises, some investors are speculating whether venture capital firms should fund large language models like Character.AI’s, given the enormous computational costs of developing and operating this type of language.
Some in the industry argue that it makes more sense for these startups to seek support from strategic investors like Microsoft, which is investing more than $10 billion in OpenAI.
Technology news site The Information reported in July that Character.AI was talking to investors about a new round of funding.