Ex-Google employees’ A.I. chatbot startup valued at $1 billion after Andreessen Horowitz funding Character.AI, an artificial intelligence start-up founded by two former Google employees, is capitalizing on venture capitalists’ unquenchable thirst for deals in technology’s hottest space. The two-year-old company said on Thursday that it raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who helped created the architecture used in popular chatbots, left Google in 2021 and founded Character.AI the same year.