companies

Inworld AI

Builds an AI character engine that gives game NPCs memory, personality, and real-time voice, used by major studios and platform partners.

Inworld AI was founded in 2021 by Ilya Gelfenbeyn, Kylan Gibbs, and Michael Ermolenko and is based in Mountain View, California. The company builds a Character Engine that lets game studios and other developers create non-player characters with persistent memory, personality traits, emotional states, and goal-driven behavior, rather than relying on the branching dialogue trees that have driven NPC conversation for decades. The platform chains together speech recognition, text-to-speech, and safety filtering behind a single API, and ships SDKs for Unreal Engine, Unity, and web and mobile clients, alongside a no-code studio for authoring character personas. Partners and pilots have included Microsoft's Xbox team, LG, Dentsu, and a roster of indie and mid-size studios experimenting with AI-driven companions and quest-givers. Inworld has raised more than $120 million from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Microsoft's M12, Samsung Next, and Stanford University, valuing the company at roughly $500 million as of its August 2023 Series B round.

Founded

2021

Headquarters

Mountain View, United States

Sector

applications