Chatbot startup Character AI valued at $1 billion in new funding round

Character.AI, a 16-month-old startup that builds online chatbots, said it had raised $150 million in a recent funding round that valued the company at $1 billion.

Character.AI is among a tiny group of small companies – along with the tech industry’s giants – that are building technology that could one day rival the systems under development at OpenAI, the San Francisco startup that incited the AI boom with the release of an online chatbot called ChatGPT.