The developer platform built for creating AI-driven virtual characters, Inworld AI, has announced closing its Series A funding round, raising another $50 million to create interactive AI characters for Gaming and the Metaverse.
The startup, founded by conversational AI pioneers Ilya Gelfenbeyn, Michael Ermolenko, and Kylan Gibbs, aims to introduce richer social interactions for immersive experiences in gaming, metaverses, entertainment, and brand initiatives.
The round was led by Section 32 and Intel Capital and saw participation from Founders Fund, Accelerator Investments LLC, First Spark Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, BITKRAFT Ventures, CRV, Microsoft’s M12 fund, Micron Ventures, LG Technology Ventures, SK Telecom Venture Capital, NTT Docomo Ventures, and The Venture Reality Fund.
Inworld helps create virtual characters for gaming, metaverse, and business applications. Virtual worlds have improved immersion, realism, and openness, but character interactions have mainly remained static and reliant on pre-written dialogue and actions.
With the aid of cutting-edge AI, Inworld creates generative characters with personalities, thoughts, memories, and actions that are intended to resemble the intensely social aspects of human interaction. Writers, designers, and creators can build AI characters using the no-code studio on the Inworld platform. Character deployment into game environments is simpler for developers by integrations with the most widely used game engines, such as Unreal and Unity.
“This is the future of entertainment–stories that are told through characters with a rich inner life, that audiences are invited to participate in, and take immersion to the next level,” said Ilya Gelfenbeyn, CEO at Inworld.
The company has raised roughly $70 million since its founding in July 2021, including the $50 million Series A round and pre-seed and seed rounds totaling almost $20 million.
Inworld has launched its beta version, hired Academy Award winner John Gaeta as Chief Creative Officer, and been chosen as one of six companies to participate in the 2022 Disney Accelerator since closing its seed round in March 2022. Outside gaming and the metaverse, Inworld has many uses, including entertainment, sales and marketing, and training and education.
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