Before becoming a unicorn, Character.AI had constantly hit milestones since its beta launch in September 2022.
As the AI buzz continues, Silicon Valley chatbot startup Character.AI has attained a unicorn status after securing $150 million in a funding round. The company announced the Series A round earlier in the month. Having generated this amount, Character.AI saw its valuation rise to $1 billion as it hit unicorn status.
Character.AI Attains Unicorn Status
In a press release announcing the successful Series A funding, Character.AI said Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the round that caused it to reach unicorn status. In addition to a16z, its previous investors contributed to the new milestone. They are SV Angel, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, A Capital Ventures, and Elad Gil.
The 16-month-old chatbot startup by two ex-Google employees, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, has grown to the top of AI technology. The company said it would use the new funding to further its growth by expanding its computing abilities. As such, the AI startup will boast a more sophisticated model with higher accuracy that delivers excellent features and services to consumers. It also plans to broaden its engineering team. Commenting on the Series A funding that led to the newly-attained unicorn status, Shazeer, who co-founded Character.AI with Freitas, stated:
“Character.AI’s power is our highly-sophisticated language model, which rapidly analyzes and contextualizes large volumes of information to produce useful intelligence tailored to each individual, making it a personalized superintelligence companion that enhances productivity, offers advice, educates, and entertains. The potential use cases are infinite.”
Character.AI’s Achievements
Before becoming a unicorn, Character.AI had constantly hit milestones since its beta launch in September 2022. It saw an X4 increase to almost 100 million monthly site visits in two months. In addition, users have sent over 2 billion messages since inception. The first 1 billion messages were sent within four months, while another billion were sent in a month. The technology which allows users to create characters said over 2.7 million characters had been created so far. Meanwhile, it rolled out with less than 100. More interestingly, Similarweb rankings put the platform among the global top 400 websites on a monthly basis.
Character.AI is not the first AI startup to achieve a unicorn status. At the same time, more companies have generated more funding as the AI craze lingers. The market rush began in January when Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment into ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Artificial intelligence company Anthropic was said to secure a $300 million investment led by Spark Capital. The cash injection caused the company to climb to a pre-investment valuation of $4.1 billion. People with knowledge of the matter revealed that the Spark Capital-led funding came after the AI company reviewed $400 million from Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL).
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