Like many young people of her generation, Fai Nur was what she called a “chronically online teenager.” She obsessed over music groups, TV shows, and flicks, and never missed the prospect to speak about her interests endlessly online. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, she saw potential immediately. “AI could finally let any user actually simulate any character, not only watch or speak about their favorite worlds, but live inside them,” she told TechCrunch.
“The role-play and immersion that fans had all the time wanted was suddenly possible at scale,” she said. She brought in her friend Amit Bhatnagar, who grew up constructing Minecraft games, and Pritesh Kadiwala, and the three of them began constructing Status AI: a gamified social media app where users can play any character in any universe. The app officially got here out of stealth last 12 months.
To make use of the app, Nur said, users first craft a persona and are then transported right into a social world built around them. “A user can turn out to be a star with hundreds of thousands of followers, step inside their favorite show or book, run for president, or go viral on the web,” Nur said.
The worlds on Status are user-generated, where settings, stories, and characters all come from player interaction. “You choose one character to be your first follower, then earn more because the story progresses.” There are each multiplayer and single-player modes for users trying to connect with friends within the app. “We’re fielding interest from studios and streamers,” she said. “They see Status as a strategy to develop audiences before bringing fans together in theaters or arenas.”
The corporate announced Tuesday $17 million in combined seed and Series A funding, with investors including Abstract, General Catalyst, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, and LightShed Partners. The raise is a bet that consumer social’s next chapter isn’t one other feed but as an alternative interactive entertainment and the IP franchises that include it.
The era of passive entertainment — users sitting back and watching other people’s lives scroll past — is coming to an end, Nur argues. And the primary generation of AI social apps, built across the chatbot experience as seen with Character.AI and Chai, is already beginning to feel dated.
“Status is built on the premise that the subsequent generation doesn’t want to look at stories,” she said. “They need to have interaction with the stories and even live inside them.”
That shift has the eye of media corporations. Status investor Wealthy Greenfield, a partner at LightShed, told TechCrunch that each media company lately is “desperately looking for ways to get consumers to live contained in the worlds and characters they create.”
In some ways, Nur says the corporate is hoping to reimagine what a consumer app looks like in a post-AI world. “We’re using AI to create immersive, fun experiences which are brand-safe, interactive, and endlessly dynamic.” Status can be a part of a trend on which TechCrunch reported late last 12 months, suggesting the longer term of social media will likely be less generalized and more focused on fandom and area of interest communities.
Consumer investor Natalie Dillon of Maveron has argued the winners of the brand new era of social media will likely be “the platforms that mix intimacy, utility, and creativity in a single ecosystem,” in that they won’t “appear like traditional social networks; they’ll feel like multiplayer environments where people can construct, buy, and belong abruptly.”
Nur said the fresh capital will likely be used to assist scale the platform. Already, she said, Status has seen greater than 13 million worlds created, with greater than 5 million character profiles — metrics that suggest strong early engagement in what Nur calls a brand new category: immersive social entertainment.
“Our early users were predominantly young women,” she said. “And this has consistently been the audience that decides which platforms turn out to be culture.”
This text was updated so as to add Union Square Ventures as an investor.
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