Participated · Equity · Apr 2022

Inworld AI builds a Character Engine that powers AI-driven non-player characters (NPCs) for games, entertainment, and interactive experiences. The platform orchestrates multiple machine learning models to produce multimodal character expression—dialogue, memory, goals, emotional intelligence—and can link character 'brains' to animation and rigging in 3D engines. Inworld’s technology is integrated with major game engines and marketplaces, including Unity's AI Marketplace as a Unity Verified Solution and work with Unreal Engine MetaHumans; the company also received an Epic MegaGrant. Customers and partners include Team Miaozi (NetEase Games), Niantic 8th Wall, ILM Immersive, LG UPlus, Alpine Electronics, and community-created mods for Skyrim, Stardew Valley, and Grand Theft Auto V. The company plans to use new funding to accelerate research and development, hire top talent, invest in infrastructure, and launch an open-source version of its Character Engine. Inworld says its approach goes beyond standard LLM chatbots to create lifelike NPC behaviors that can autonomously pursue goals and interact within game worlds. Founded in 2021, Inworld has raised over $100 million to date and its recent financing values the company at more than $500 million. Inworld AI offers a no-code creative suite for building AI characters and interactive digital humans. The company layers advanced generative AI on top of MetaHumans to create personalities, thoughts, memories, and behaviors designed to mimic social human interaction. Its technology powers conversations, emotions, expressions, and gestures, and characters can be designed in minutes and deployed into gaming, entertainment, education, metaverse, or brand experiences. Inworld received an Epic MegaGrant from Epic Games to combine its AI solutions with Epic’s MetaHuman technology and enable integration into Unreal Engine experiences. CEO Ilya Gelfenbeyn said the company is honored to receive the MegaGrant and is excited to help developers add interactive digital humans. The article does not disclose revenue, users, or other financial metrics. Inworld AI builds AI-powered virtual characters primarily for games and broader entertainment and marketing campaigns. The company offers a platform and integrations with engines like Unreal Engine and Unity to create NPCs and digital representatives with memories, personalities and human-like behaviors. Customers describe characters in natural language and tailor goals, speech patterns, knowledge and voice; characters undergo a training process and query Inworld's cloud-hosted system for dialogue. Inworld launched in 2021, released its first product after a March seed round and is currently in limited beta while exploring pricing and cost-reduction strategies. The company has 42 employees, added chief creative officer John Gaeta, and was selected for the 2022 Disney Accelerator. Proceeds from fundraising are earmarked for product development, research, hiring and customer acquisition as it seeks partners to deploy AI characters beyond gaming. Inworld AI offers a Studio product and beta tools that let developers create richly detailed, conversational NPCs using natural-language core descriptions and configurable character fields with no code. The system runs online and queries large language models to produce unscripted dialogue, while leaving visuals to external art pipelines and integrating with game engines like Unreal and Unity. Characters can be given motivations, personality traits, world knowledge, rote responses, blacklists, and standard safety filters to bias behavior and constrain outputs. In demos the generated characters produced natural-feeling, game-relevant responses, though the company and reviewer noted the demonstrations were limited and staged. Inworld plans to publish a short game to showcase its character generators and is running a private beta with early access applications. The company recently raised $10 million (and counting) from a group of angel investors including Riot Games, The Sandbox, Roblox, Disney, Animoca Brands, Twitch and Oculus. Inworld AI provides a developer platform for creating AI-powered virtual human agents that populate metaverses, VR/AR experiences, games, and other virtual worlds. Its AI enables virtual agents to exhibit unique behaviors and awareness of their context and environment, and agents are embeddable and deployable across a range of immersive realities. The platform is positioned to let brands create virtual representatives for ecommerce, operations, and customer support, and to help enterprises run immersive training and video-game makers build realistic NPCs. The company emphasizes in-world roles such as advising, support, entertainment, and other intended functions. Inworld AI is co-founded by CEO Ilya Gelfenbeyn and CTO Michael Ermolenko and is based in Mountain View, Calif. The company raised a $7M seed round, which represents its current disclosed financing event.