Character.ai raises $150 million to create personalized chatbots

• The eventual monetization plan is direct-to-consumer subscription fees.
• Character.ai tells Axios that users already have sent its AI characters — some of which include real-life celebrities and fictional characters — more than 2 billion messages, including 1 billion in just the last month.

Other investors include Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, SV Angel and A Capital. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company previously raised around $40 million, mostly from individual investors.

Quotable: "There are some overlaps, but we're confident Google will never do anything fun. Because we worked there." — Daniel De Freitas, co-founder and president of Character.ai, when asked by Axios about Google's new Bard chatbot

Look ahead: Don't be surprised to see this funding round get extended soon with strategic investors, perhaps including one that can provide the company with compute power (e.g., Microsoft/OpenAI).

• The FT previously reported the total round size would be between $200 million and $250 million, so this appears to be just the initial, VC portion.