Character.AI taps Meta’s former VP of business products as CEO

Character, the chatbot supplier supported by Google with tens of millions of monthly active users, announcement Friday, that Karandeep Anand, the former vice-president of Meta commercial products, joined the company as CEO.

Previously advisor to the Character Board of Directors.AI, Anand is in the role of CEO at a pivotal time for the Chatbot supplier, while the company tries to simultaneously develop its platform while fighting on children’s safety problems. In recent months, the character has added a range of new safety features in the light of an active trial, which alleges that one of the company’s chatbots played a role in the death of a 14 -year -old Florida boy.

Anand comes to the character. AI with an advertising product management experience that has reached billions of users on META applications. Previously, Anand was responsible for the management of Microsoft products, supervising the user experience on the company’s cloud platform, Azure. More recently, Anand was president of the Fintech Brex startup.

Anand takes up the character. A little over 10 months after Google hired the startup co-founder and CEO, Noam ShazeerWho had previously managed the AI ​​basic teams to the View Mountain giant. At the time, Google also signed a non -exclusive agreement to use character technology.

The agreement with character google. federal regulators to investigate the relationships of companies on antitrust concerns. It is one of the many Acquihire’s reverse transactions in the AI ​​start -up space that has received a regulatory examination, alongside Microsoft’s agreement with the inflection..

Persiator.ai raised more than $ 150 million in venture capital funding, largely from Andreessen Horowitz.

In a blog post, Anand said that one of her first priorities would be to make security filters “less authoritarian”. The new CEO noted that the company is deeply concerned about user safety, but that too often, “the application filters things that are perfectly harmless”.

Anand also said that he planned to improve the quality of AI models on the character platform. AI, innovate around memory functionalities and increase transparency around decision-making. He says that many of these features arrive in the next 60 days.

Chatbots which are purely designed for entertainment, in which the character specializes, are transformed into a massive market for a generative AI – a trend that has been surprising for many. In 2024, 66% of users of the company were between 18 and 24 years old, and 72% of the company’s users were women, according to data from Sensor.