Forget streaming: Status AI raises $17 million to turn social media into interactive entertainment

Like many young people of her generation, Faye Noor was what she called a “chronic internet teen.” She was obsessed with music groups, TV shows, and movies, and never missed an opportunity to endlessly talk about her interests online. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, she saw the potential right away. “Finally, AI could allow any user to emulate any character and not just watch or talk about their favorite worlds, but live within them,” she told TechCrunch.

“The role-playing and immersion that fans have always wanted is suddenly possible on a massive scale,” she said. She brought in her friends Amit Bhatnagar, who grew up building Minecraft games, and Pritesh Kadiwala, and the three started building The state of artificial intelligence: A fun social media app where users can play Any character in any universe. The app officially came out of stealth last year.

Nour said that to use the app, users first create a character and are then transported into a social world built around them. “The user can become a celebrity with millions of followers, access his favorite show or book, run for president, or go viral on the Internet,” Nour said.

The worlds in the case are user-created, with settings, stories, and characters coming from player interaction. “You choose one character to be your first follower, then gain more as the story progresses.” There are multiplayer and single-player modes for users looking to connect with friends in the app. “We are getting interest from studios and streamers,” she said. “They look at the case as a way to develop audiences before bringing fans together in theaters or arenas.”

The company on Tuesday announced a $17 million Series A seed round, with investors including General Catalyst, Y Combinator, LightShed Partners and Abstract. The increase is a bet that the next chapter of the consumer social network is not another feed but instead interactive entertainment and the IP franchises that come with it.

Nour says the era of passive entertainment, where users sit and watch other people’s lives, is coming to an end. And the first generation of social AI apps, built on the chatbot experience as we’ve seen with Character.AI and Chai, are already starting to look dated.

“The niche is built on the premise that the next generation doesn’t want to watch stories,” she said. “They want to interact with the stories and even live within them.”

This shift is of interest to media companies. Case investor Rich Greenfield, a partner at LightShed, told TechCrunch that every media company these days is “desperately looking for ways to make consumers live within the worlds and characters they create.”

In some ways, Noor says the company hopes to reimagine what a consumer app looks like in a post-AI world. “We use AI to create endless immersive, fun, brand-safe, interactive and dynamic experiences.” Status is also part of the trend that TechCrunch reported late last yearWhich suggests that the future of social media will be less general and more focused on mass and niche communities.

Consumer investor Natalie Dillon of Maveron said the winners in the new era of social media will be “platforms that combine intimacy, utility and creativity into a single ecosystem”, as they will not “look like traditional social networks; rather, they will feel like multiplayer environments where people can build, buy and belong simultaneously”.

Nour said the new capital will be used to help expand the platform. She said Status has already seen more than 13 million worlds created, with more than 5 million character profiles — metrics that indicate strong early engagement in what Noor calls a new category: immersive social entertainment.

“Our first users were mostly young women,” she said. “And this has been the audience that is constantly deciding which platforms become culture.”