Like many young people of her generation, Fai Noor was what she called a “chronic online teenager.” She was obsessed with music bands, TV shows and movies and never missed an opportunity to talk about her interests endlessly online. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, he immediately saw the potential. “Artificial intelligence could eventually allow any user to truly emulate any character, not just watch or talk about their favorite worlds, but live in them,” he told TechCrunch.
“The role-playing and immersion that fans have always wanted was suddenly possible at scale,” he said. She brought in her friend Amit Bhatnagar, who grew up making Minecraft games, and Pritesh Kadiwala, and the three of them started building AI status: a gamified social media app where users can play any character in any universe. The app officially came out of stealth last year.
To use the app, Nur said, users first construct a persona and are then transported into a social world built around them. “A user can become a celebrity with millions of followers, get on their favorite show or book, run for president or go viral on the internet,” Nur said.
The worlds in Status are user-created, where settings, stories, and characters come from player interaction. “You choose a character to be your first follower and then earn more as the story progresses.” There are multiplayer and single player modes for users who want to connect with friends on the app. “We’re getting interest from studios and streamers,” he said. “They see Status as a way to grow an audience before bringing fans into theaters or arenas.”
The company on Tuesday announced $17 million in combined seed and Series A funding, with investors including Abstract, General Catalyst, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and LightShed Partners. The surge is a bet that the next chapter of consumer social networking isn’t another feed, but instead interactive entertainment and the accompanying IP franchises.
The age of passive entertainment – users sitting back and watching other people’s lives – is coming to an end, Nur argues. And the first generation of social AI apps, built around the chatbot experience, as seen with Character.AI and Chai, is already starting to feel dated.
“The situation is based on the assumption that the next generation does not want to watch stories,” he said. “They want to engage with the stories and even live in them.”
This change has the attention of media companies. Status investor Rich Greenfield, a partner at LightShed, told TechCrunch that every media company these days is “desperately looking for ways to make consumers live inside the worlds and characters they create.”
In a way, Nur says the company hopes to rethink what a consumer app looks like in a post-AI world. “We use artificial intelligence to create engaging, fun experiences that are brand-safe, interactive and endlessly dynamic.” The status is also part of a trend that TechCrunch reported on late last year, suggesting that the future of social media will be less generalized and more focused on communities of followers and niches.
Consumer investor Natalie Dillon of Maveron argued that the winners of the new social media era will be “the platforms that combine intimacy, utility and creativity in one ecosystem”, as they will not “look like traditional social networks; they will feel like multiplayer environments where people can create, buy and belong at the same time”.
Nur said the fresh capital will be used to help scale the platform. Already, he said, Status has seen more than 13 million worlds created, with more than 5 million character profiles — metrics that indicate strong early engagement in what Nur calls a new category: immersive social entertainment.
“Our first users were mostly young women,” he said. “And it’s consistently the audience that decides which platforms become culture.”
This article has been updated to add Union Square Ventures as an investor.
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