Character.AI stock & equity tools

Character.ai is a generative AI chatbot service where users can engage in conversations with customizable characters. It was designed by the developers of Google LaMDA, Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas.

Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas founded Character.AI in 2021 after leaving Google, where Shazeer had led the team that built the LaMDA conversational model. The company raised more than $150 million largely from a16z and reached a $1 billion valuation as consumer chatbot demand surged in 2023. In August 2024, Google paid roughly $2.7 billion for a non-exclusive license to Character.AI's technology and rehired Shazeer, De Freitas, and members of the research team into DeepMind in a deal regulators have described as a reverse acquihire. Character.AI continued as an independent company under interim CEO Dominic Perella, with most staff staying, and uses both internally-developed and third-party language models to power its consumer chatbot product.

Sources: techcrunch.com · washingtonpost.com · cnbc.com

Equity comp at Character.AI

• In August 2024, Google struck a deal to license Character.AI's technology and hired the founding team (including Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas) back to Google in a transaction valued at roughly $2.7 billion. Character.AI continued as an independent company under new leadership. Employees who joined before the acquihire held equity in an entity that lost its founding team but retained its technology license; post-deal equity value depends on the standalone company's performance, not Google's stock.

Researched 2026-05-07.