C.AI hit $30M+ Rev pivot to entertainment Co., 3 AI SEO startups backed by VC
The AI SEO era is coming
Character AI is back!
Since Character AI (hereafter C.AI) “sold itself” to Google for a $2.5B valuation, we haven’t heard much news about it.
But recently, a lot has changed at C.AI. First, in June, they appointed a new CEO, Karandeep Anand. He was previously President at Brex, before that VP & Head of Business Products at Meta, and earlier held executive roles at Microsoft.
Most notably, C.AI has launched the world’s first AI-native social feed—a dynamic, scrollable content platform bringing together the latest characters, scenes, streams, and creator-driven videos.
C.AI calls it a milestone in the evolution of online entertainment. For the past decade, social platforms have been built around passive consumption. The new Feed breaks that paradigm, turning content into a creative playground. Every post is an open invitation to interact, remix, and build on others’ work.
Want to rewrite a storyline? Make yourself the protagonist? Drop a character you just met in someone else’s scene into a roast battle or debate? Now it’s easy. Every story can have billions of endings, and every piece of content can change and evolve with a single click.
This launch shifts C.AI from a chat-first app into a next-gen, content-driven social platform. It’s not just about watching—it’s about creating. The Feed marks a fundamental evolution in how people engage with AI, storytelling, and each other.
Today, C.AI announced it has reached $30M+ in revenue run rate, aiming for $50 million by the end of the year, with 20M MAUs. On average, users spend 75 minutes a day chatting with their AI companions.
Revenue comes primarily from a $10/month subscription and an ad model—likely tied to the new CEO’s background running massive ad operations at Meta, where he oversaw product ad operations for billions of users.
Research shows that C.AI’s user engagement ranks among the highest in the AI space. Over 70% of users are women, and nearly 90% are under 35—completely different from productivity-focused AI products.
a16z partner Olivia Moore put it bluntly: “After looking at C.AI’s data, I believe AI boyfriends are real.”
The user base mirrors the AI social companion I’ve introduced about before, where roughly half the users are young women, and daily usage time now exceeds that of TikTok.
C.AI team member James Groeneveld recently shared that when Google gutted their pretraining team, most people thought it was the end. Yet now, daily user engagement seconds have hit 35B, over 9M Characters are created each month, and paid subscriptions are up 400% year-over-year.
C.AI now claims the most talent-dense GenAI product team in the world, with multiple areas of the company growing rapidly.
CEO Karandeep Anand now positions C.AI as an entertainment company with 20M MAUs—aligned with the product’s new feature direction. He sees the Feed as dissolving the line between creators and consumers. You can watch great creator content or spin it into your own stories. The doomscroll era is over—C.AI wants to lead the AI-powered entertainment future.
The AI SEO era is coming: 3 AI SEO startups backed by VC
Meanwhile, in yesterday’s piece on AI SEO, I said AI SEO—aka GEO—is becoming a hot new founder play, and may be at the start of a paradigm shift.
In March, OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy wrote on X: “99.9% of future attention will shift to LLM attention.”
Beyond yesterday’s fast-growing GEO product, I’ve found at least three others with top-tier VC backing and rapid traction. All focused on helping businesses get surfaced in AI search summaries.
