Character AI Pitch Deck

Character.ai was co-founded in November 2021 by two former Google engineers: Noam Shazeer (co-author of the seminal 2017 transformer paper, "Attention Is All You Need") and Daniel de Freitas.

The company's role-playing chatbot platform that lets users chat with AI personalities modeled after fictional characters, celebrities, or custom-created personas.

This deck was used to raise a $43 million seed round in December 2021 backed by prominent investors like Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, SV Angel, and more.

By 2023, Character AI was valued at $1 billion after raising a $150 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

But by 2024, Character AI became the face of high profile examples of "AI psychosis" after multiple cases of teens under the ag of 14 committing suicide after months of using their chatbots.

From 2024 onwards, Character.ai faced multiple lawsuits accusing the platform of responsibility for teen suicides, self-harm, violence, and providing inappropriate or sexual content to minors. After settling five of those cases, the company faced severe financial problems, filing for bankruptcy in October 2026.

$43M • 2021 • Seed