We’re excited to announce that Karandeep Anand has joined Character.AI as Chief Executive Officer.

Karan is no stranger to Character.AI — he’s spent the past nine months as a Board Advisor, playing a key role in shaping our product strategy and user experience. He brings a proven track record of scaling industry-leading consumer products, most recently serving as President of Brex. Prior to that, he was Vice President and Head of Business Products at Meta, and held executive roles at Microsoft. As CEO, Karan will focus on advancing Character.AI’s long-term strategy, leveraging our market-leading multimodal AI technology and expanding our user community to help shape the future of entertainment.

With Karan’s arrival, we’re also excited to announce that Dominic Perella will take on a new role as Chief Legal Officer & SVP of Global Affairs. With an experienced leadership team in place, we’re well-positioned for the next steps in our journey.

Below is the note Karan shared to introduce himself to our global community of passionate users and creators. 

Please join us in welcoming Karan to the team!

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Dear C.AI Community, 

Hi! I want to introduce myself. My name is Karandeep Anand, and I’m the new CEO of Character AI.

I recently took on the CEO role, but I’m not new to the company – I’ve recently been helping and advising the team at Character, and have been a big fan of the product for a long time. So I know how special the Character community is. I know how deep a connection you feel to the platform and to your Characters. And I know you’ve been asking for new features and improvements that will make the c.ai experience better and richer.

Here’s my commitment to you: We’re going to move fast to give you a bunch of the things you’ve been asking for. A few examples of things coming in the next 60 days:

We’re going to improve memory and overall model quality. Our research team is currently working on refining open source models to provide better memory and quality for Characters We’re going to make the filter less overbearing. (We care deeply about user safety and always will. But too often, the app filters things that are perfectly harmless. We’re going to fix that.)We’re going to implement better ways to tag your Characters and improve search and discoverability to help you find newer Characters. Give you better control and organization over Characters, including the ability to Archive them.More transparency on what we do or don’t allow during Character Creation to prevent “shadowbans”.

Separately, we’re also working on a bunch of features that let our creators make richer, more immersive and expressive Characters. Some of these are already live – give them a try! Over the coming months, we’re going to make all of these features easier to use, and we’re going to make sure they give you more and more options for what Characters can do. Your Characters are going to jump off the page, interacting in audio and video and inhabiting new worlds.

These aren’t promises for the distant future; I’m committing to launch all of that this summer and the team is hard at work to make all this real soon. I’ve spent many years building products, and I’m going to make sure we move fast and give you features that delight you and make c.ai more immersive and more fun.

Thanks for spending time with us. We appreciate each and every one of you.

Karan