Character Technologies, Inc.

Character Technologies, Inc. is an American AI startup headquartered in Menlo Park, California, founded in November 2021 by former Google engineers Noam Shazeer (co-author of the paper "Attention Is All You Need") and Daniel de Freitas (lead designer of the LaMDA model). The company is the maker of the consumer conversational service Character.AI, whose public beta launched on September 16, 2022. In March 2023 the company closed a 150M USD Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz at an approximately 1B USD valuation. In August 2024 Google hired Noam Shazeer and part of the team while signing a non-exclusive licensing agreement for Character.AI technology – the company itself remained an independent entity responsible for the service and its moderation. In the following years it faced multiple lawsuits and criticism over teen safety, introducing a dedicated model for users under 18 in December 2024 and announcing in October 2025 a full ban on chatbot interactions for minors starting November 25, 2025.