Kaon AI raises $60M to build the next generation of AI-driven interactive entertainment

Kaon AI, a generative artificial intelligence platform and research outfit formerly known as FlowGPT that provides online interactive entertainment, today announced it has raised $60 million across recent funding rounds.

The San Mateo company is backed by numerous technology sector venture capital investors, including B Capital, Redpoint Ace, Goodwater Capital and DCM. Today’s announcement follows $10 million raised in 2024 in pre-Series A funding.

Helmed by Chief Executive Jay Dang, Kaon said this funding round will allow the company’s Berkeley-educated founding team to change how people approach and consume digital media.

“Every streaming platform today recommends what could be your next favorite show from a long list of preset options,” said Dang. “In the generative AI era, though, this finite catalog is poised to become the ‘Blockbuster’ of the 2020sA. t Kaon, we’re building a new type of content engine to create individualized narratives that truly resonate, moving the industry past static text prompts and into real-time multimedia.”

Emochi, the company’s flagship consumer product, provides multimedia character-driven interactive stories that allow users to build their own narrative. As the user talks to the platform, answering questions and leading the story, the platform generates the story, visuals and video experiences for them.

The company’s founders argue that the current media paradigm is static. Studios must create artwork, stories, movies and other forms of entertainment by looking at what audiences want and the platforms that provide them, becoming recommendation engines that guide them to the best fit, while making money from and turning the customer journey into a product.

With apps such as Emochi, which provides an interactive AI experience, Kaon wants to change how users consume media by generating it based on preferences and user intent.

In this manner, Kaon isn’t much different from chatbot-driven character-storytelling platforms such as Character.ai. To differentiate from similar platforms, Kaon’s Emochi provides dynamic storytelling by generating videos and images to support entertainment and deep-preference memory, allowing customers to become co-creators of the experience.

To power these experiences, the company said, its technical team is building a custom technology stack architecture that manages more than 1,000 graphics processing units across dedicated partners, including Nebius Group N.V. and DigitalOcean LLC. Using this infrastructure, the company can handle trillion-level token volumes at roughly 10 times lower cost than legacy cloud infrastructure, while maintaining generation quality.

The company said its Emochi app already delivers an average session of 150 minutes for its more than 2 million daily active users.

Kaon’s new research arm, Kaon Labs, will take advantage of a millions-strong customer base to help shape the next generation of entertainment. Using marking data, text inputs, preferences and the paths that users take to generate their own content, the company saidn it can bring new interactive entertainment-oriented AI models to market in days rather than months.

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