companies

Convai

Builds 3D AI characters with vision, memory, and voice for games, training simulations, and virtual worlds.

Convai was founded in 2022 by Purnendu Mukherjee, a former NVIDIA conversational AI engineer, to build infrastructure for embodied AI characters that can perceive and act inside 3D virtual environments rather than just chat in text. The San Jose company's platform combines speech recognition, a narrative and behavior layer, and text-to-speech with a vision system, so a character can register what's on a table or where the player is standing before responding. Convai's customer base splits roughly evenly between game studios building NPCs and non-gaming clients using the same technology for training simulations, virtual receptionists, and branded virtual humans. By 2024 the platform had more than 15,000 registered users, with plugins for Unity and Unreal Engine via Fab alongside web and mobile SDKs. The company raised a $5 million seed round from investors including Rainfall Ventures and Monta Vista Capital, and co-founder Prashant Mishra, previously a Google engineer, joined to lead engineering.

Founded

2022

Headquarters

San Jose, United States

Sector

applications