Character.AI is starting a new chapter after its $2.7 billion licensing deal with Google, which involved CEO Noam Shazeer returning to the search giant. It hired Erin Teague as a chief product officer, a YouTube exec who was the global head of sports movies and shows product management.
Teague, who has been working at Google since 2016, will join Character.AI next week. She also previously served as a technical adviser to the SVP for Search, Ads, Maps, Gemini, Assistant, shopping, and payments most recently.
“Character.AI is setting a new bar for how everyday users interact with AI, pioneering personalized and engaging AI experiences at scale,” Teague said in a statement. “I look forward to building on this one-of-a-kind platform to innovate and design new features that entertain and delight.”
In August, the company announced that Shazeer was returning to Google. Another co-founder, Daniel De Freitas, also joined Google with 30 researchers.
Post these departures, Dominic Perella, Character.AI’s interim CEO and general counsel, told TechCrunch that the company has roughly 100 employees now and will completely focus on consumer AI solutions rather than chase artificial general intelligence. As departing employees mostly focused on pre-training models, the people who are still at Character.AI are largely focused on engineering, product, and post-training and tuning models.
Teague is the first major hire for the company after the co-founders departed to Google. Character.AI said that it will still keep looking for new C-Suite executives including a CEO to replace Perella.
Character.AI’s product and roadmap
The company has bought out all investors, and it’s completely employee-owned. No VC owns shares in Character.AI. The board consists of a16z and another employee.
“I expect that sometime next year, we will go out to the market and raise funds with a new venture capital partner. The reason for this is to have that investment in the company and get additional governance, partnership, and thought leadership,” Perella said.
Character.AI, which lets users create and interact with different AI-powered characters, now has more than 20 million monthly users, which has doubled year over year. The platform now has over 100 million characters.
In June, the company launched the ability for users to call AI characters and talk with them. The startup said that users have made over 107 million calls, and 40% of its users have made at least one call.
Perella added that Character.AI characters can already talk to people through text and voice, but the company is exploring other modalities, too.
The service’s $9.99 c.ai+ subscription is one of only consistent money-generating sources. However, the company is not currently concentrating on revenue generation and is instead focusing on growth.
Character.AI said that a lot of companies have approached the startup to power their characters, and it has explored some of these partnerships, but Perella didn’t specify whether there was something concrete on the cards.
“The vision that we have is that the next big consumer platform is really going to be about personalizing your interests in a way that algorithmic feeds of the last generation didn’t,” Perella said.
