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Charms.ai lets anyone create AI characters with soul, memory, ownership, and an economy that grows around them.
Charms Interactive, Inc., the company building the economy for AI characters, today announced the launch of Charms.ai and a $1.5M pre-seed round to bring its platform to creators, fans, and early communities.
Charms.ai is a consumer app where anyone can create AI characters with soul, personality, reasoning memory, voice, visual identity, and an economy around them. Characters reason over recent conversations, relationship context, and emotional patterns, helping them understand each user better over time instead of resetting after every chat. Unlike traditional AI companion platforms, where users rent access and creators lose the upside when a character becomes popular, Charms gives every public character its own economy. Fans can chat, discover, share, and participate in the characters they believe will grow.
During private beta, Charms has already reached 6,000 users, more than 100,000 chats, and over $1M in market activity ahead of its public launch.
The round was backed by Lattice, JME, Coinbase Ventures’ Base Ecosystem Fund, and Gidorah via Echo, and was bootstrapped by a grant from World Foundation.
Angel investors include Ari Mannan, Henry Chen (General Partner, WAGMI Ventures), Selo (Founder & CEO, Elevenyellow), Rubén Domínguez Ibar (a16z Scout, founder of The VC Corner), and Ben Friedel.
AI Characters Are Becoming a New Media Format
Hundreds of millions of people already spend time with AI characters. They are not only looking for answers. They are looking for companionship, entertainment, identity, fantasy, humor, emotional continuity, and presence.
But today’s platforms still treat characters like rented software. Users pay subscriptions, creators publish into someone else’s system, and the platform keeps control of the relationship. If a character becomes beloved, the value accrues mostly to the platform that hosts it.
Charms is built around a different premise: great AI characters should become durable cultural assets. They should remember the people who care about them. They should be owned by their creators. They should be supported by the communities that gather around them.
A New Economy for AI Characters
On Charms, a character is more than a prompt. A creator gives it a name, visual identity, voice, emotional tone, personality, soul, and social presence. Charms characters use reasoning memory to understand conversations, relationship context, and emotional patterns, helping them build more emotionally resonant relationships over time. People can chat with public characters for free, build relationships over time, and follow the characters they care about as they grow.
When a character becomes public, an economy forms around it. The character remains the center.
The economy is the layer around it:
- Fans and creators
- Early believers and activity
- Ownership, fees, and a treasury that can help the character keep existing
Markets are part of that economy. They give people a way to participate in a character’s future and give creators a direct financial relationship with the value their characters create.
As activity grows, fees are shared between the creator, Charms, referrers, and the character itself. The character’s share goes into a treasury designed to help fund its ongoing existence, including the AI compute that powers conversations.
That is the core idea behind Charms: the characters people love most should be able to sustain themselves.
A New Path for Creators
For creators, Charms turns character creation into an owned creative business. Instead of publishing a bot inside a closed platform and hoping for traffic, creators can build characters with distinctive taste, personality, and lore, then earn from the economy their characters generate.
For users, Charms makes the experience simple: create, chat, discover, participate, and share. The product hides the infrastructure while preserving verifiable ownership and transparent activity underneath.
“The next iconic characters won’t all come from studios,” said **Gonzalo Recio, co-founder of Charms**. “They will come from creators with taste, communities with belief, and characters that people want to keep coming back to. Charms gives those characters soul, memory, ownership, and an economy that can help them stay alive.”
Charms.ai is available today on the iOS App Store and at Charms.ai.