Only 16 months after its establishment, the chat robot company founded by former Google employees has become a $1 billion unicorn.

CTOnews.com, March 24 (Xinhua)-- Character.AI, a chat robot startup founded by two former Google employees, has grown into a $1 billion unicorn just 16 months after its founding, according to the Wall Street Journal.

On Thursday, local time, Character.AI announced that it had raised $150 million (currently about 1.024 billion yuan) in a new round of financing led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The new investment values Character.AI at $1 billion.

Us media pointed out that Character.AI is the latest company to raise funds in the artificial intelligence development competition launched by OpenAI. Last November, OpenAI released the popular chat robot ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence-driven natural language processing tool designed to mimic human-like conversations based on user prompts. Character.AI launched an early version of its software in September last year, allowing users to create and interact with chatbots.