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Character.ai

Artificial IntelligenceFounded 2021
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Company data updated: October 2026

Founders

Who Founded Character.ai?

Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas · Founded 2021 · HQ today: Menlo Park, California, United States

Who founded Character.ai?

Character.ai was founded by Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas in 2021. It is now led by Karandeep Anand.

Founders
Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas
Founded
2021
Headquarters
Menlo Park, California, United States
Number of founders
2
Current CEO
Karandeep Anand (since 2025)
Where was Character.ai founded?
Character.ai was founded in Palo Alto, California in 2021.
When was Character.ai founded?
Character.ai was founded in 2021.
Who started Character.ai?
Character.ai was founded by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas.
How old is Character.ai?
Character.ai is 5 years old as of 2026.

Founding Story

Noam Shazeer joined Google in 2000 and co-wrote the 2017 Transformer paper. Daniel De Freitas, a Brazilian-born engineer, started a chatbot project at Google that became Meena and then LaMDA, with Shazeer joining the work. When Google declined to release the chatbot publicly, the pair left in 2021 and founded Character.ai. The beta launched in September 2022, two months before ChatGPT, and the mobile apps followed in May 2023.

Background

Duke University graduate who joined Google in 2000, co-wrote 'Attention Is All You Need' (2017) and work on mixture-of-experts models, and worked on the Meena/LaMDA chatbot before leaving in 2021.

Role at Character.ai

Noam Shazeer co-founded Character.ai in 2021 and was its CEO until August 2024, when he returned to Google under the licensing deal and became a co-lead of the Gemini models at Google DeepMind. He is one of the eight authors of the Transformer paper that underpins modern large language models. In June 2026 he left Google to join OpenAI.

Noam Shazeer was born in 1976 in Philadelphia.

Shazeer was born in 1975 or 1976 and lives in Palo Alto, California.

Background

Brazilian-born software engineer who, at Google, started the chatbot project that became Meena and later LaMDA.

Role at Character.ai

Daniel De Freitas co-founded Character.ai in 2021 and served as its President. He had begun Google's open-domain chatbot work as a side project, which grew into Meena and LaMDA. He returned to Google DeepMind in August 2024 as part of the licensing deal.

De Freitas is a Brazilian computer scientist who specialises in conversational artificial intelligence. He is credited as a creator of Google's LaMDA language model and its predecessor Meena, and as of 2026 he is a research scientist at Google DeepMind.

Character.ai: CEO & Leadership History

Full timeline →

Karandeep Anand

CEO

2025 – Present

As Head of Engineering (hired from Meta), he leads the remaining technical team following Google's aggressive extraction of Character.ai's top researchers.

Dominic Perella

Interim CEO (General Counsel)

2024 – 2025

As General Counsel, he assumed the role of interim CEO following the abrupt departure of both founders to Google, tasked with stabilizing the massive consumer platform.

Noam Shazeer

Co-founder & CEO

2021 – 2024

As Co-Founder and CEO, he famously left Google (where he co-authored the foundational 'Attention is All You Need' paper) to build Character.ai, before controversially returning to Google in 2024 in a massive acqui-hire deal.

Daniel De Freitas

Co-founder & President

2021 – 2024

As Co-Founder and President, he previously led the development of Meena (Google's conversational AI) before leaving to launch Character.ai, eventually returning to Google alongside Shazeer.

Keep researching Character.ai

Who Founded Character.ai? FAQ

Who founded Character.ai?

Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, both former Google engineers, in 2021.

What is Noam Shazeer known for?

He co-wrote the 2017 paper 'Attention Is All You Need', which introduced the Transformer. He co-led Google's Gemini models after 2024 and joined OpenAI in June 2026.

What did Daniel De Freitas build at Google?

He started the chatbot project that became Meena and then LaMDA.

Why did the founders leave Google?

Google declined to release their chatbot publicly, so they left in 2021 to launch one themselves.

Are the founders still at Character.ai?

No. Both returned to Google in August 2024 under the licensing deal.

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Content is for informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Data sourced from SEC filings, annual reports, and public records. See our full disclaimer and methodology.