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

Character.ai, the Google-backed ai chatbot provider with tens of millions of monthly active users, announced On Friday, Karandep Anand, the former VP of business products at Meta, will come to the company as CEO.

Rather a management adviser of Character.ai, Anand gets into the CEO roll at a crucial moment for the chatbot provider, while the company at the same time tries to grow its platform and at the same time fight the concern about children’s safety. In recent months, Character.ai has added a series of new safety functions in the light of an active lawsuit, which claims that one of the chatbots of the company played a role in the death of a 14-year-old boy in Florida.

Anand comes to character.ai with experience running advertising products that reached billions of users on Meta’s apps. Anand previously served as head of Microsoft’s product management, where you supervised user experience on the company’s cloud platform, Azure. Anand recently served as president of the Fintech Startup Brex.

Anand takes over the character. Ai just over 10 months after Google had led the co-founder and CEO of the startup, Noam Shazeer, who had previously led Core AI teams at the Mountain View Giant. At the time, Google also signed a non-exclusive agreement to use the technology of Character.ai.

Character.ai’s deal with google prompted Federal supervisors to investigate the relationships of the companies About Antitrust. It is one of the many inverted Acquihire Deals in the AI ​​restart room that has received regulatory testing, in addition to the Microsoft deal with bending.

Karak.ai has collected more than $ 150 million in durffinancing, largely from Andreessen Horowitz.

In a blog post, Anand said that one of his first priorities would be safety filters to make ‘less adherent’. The new CEO noted that the company gives a lot to the safety of users, but all too often: “The app filters things that are completely harmless.”

Anand also said that he is planning to improve the quality of AI models on character.AIs platform, to innovate around memory functions and to increase transparency around decision -making. He says that many of these functions will come in the next 60 days.

Chatbots that are purely designed for entertainment, in which character.ai specializes, grow in a huge market for generative AI – a trend that has been surprising for many. In 2024, 66% of the company users between the ages of 18 and 24 and 72% of the company were women, according to data from Sensor Tower.