Google Explores Investment Of Tens Of Millions Of Dollars In Startup Charter.AI

Character.AI, a rapidly growing AI chatbot startup. (photo: twitter @character_ai)

JAKARTA - Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., is said to be in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Charter.AI, a rapidly growing AI chatbot startup. Sources familiar with the matter said that this investment would deepen the existing partnership between Charter.AI and Google.

This investment, which may be structured as a conversion note, will deepen the existing Character.AI partnership with Google, where they use Google's cloud and Tensor Processing Units (TPUS) services to train their models.

Charter.AI, founded by former Google employees Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, allows users to chat with virtual versions of celebrities or anime characters, while creating their own AI chatbots and assistants. This startup offers subscription models for $9.99 per month for users who want to skip virtual queues to access chatbots.

Currently, Character.AI is in talks to get equity funding from venture investors, who can assess the company as more than $5 billion. Previously, in March, the startup raised $150 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz with a valuation of $1 billion.

Talks with Google are still ongoing, and details of the deal can change, according to sources reluctant to be named because these talks are still private.

Google, like other big tech companies, has actively invested in AI startups, as part of the latest trend in which cloud service providers make deals with AI companies to encourage the use of certain cloud or hardware services in the race to build models and serve consumers in the AI realm.

Lina Khan, Chairman of the US Federal Trade Commission, stated that the agency is researching investments in cloud service providers in AI startups to check potential anti-competitive behavior.