Company announces $2.1 million pre-seed funding and emerges from stealth with Context Aware AI Companions – with 30,000+ user created companions and 500,000 monthly users already on mobile-first app.
Dippy AI, a mobile-first AI app product company, emerges from stealth with the Dippy AI character companion app to help people who want a character, or many characters, for immersive roleplay and interaction.
Companion characters range from therapists, to friends, fictional characters from movies and books, romantic partners and more.
The company is also announcing $2.1 million in pre-seed funding led by Drive Capital with participation from Carya VC, Cory Levy, Hustle Fund and Pareto20 (Edward Lando).
This funding was raised when the company was pre-product/pre-team and had just incorporated. The funding was raised when the company was planning to create a productivity tool as a Mac-based AI assistant (called Impel) but have pivoted to Dippy since then.
The Dippy iOS and Android censorship-free, filter-free app and web product has garnered 500,000 monthly users since being quietly introduced in April. Users have created 30,000+ different characters in the one month this feature has been enabled. The proactive and context-aware Dippy companions learn about users’ tastes, hobbies and behaviors and recall past conversations and information, making for a much richer experience. Users can also enjoy interactions that are one-to-many characters.
“Today people often express feeling isolated and lonely (some studies show that more than 60% of people feel lonely), where they have no one to share their private and personal thoughts, fantasies and concerns within a non-judgmental and open way,” said Akshat Jagga, CEO, Dippy AI.
“We built Dippy AI to meet those needs. They remember what you tell them, so you can have an ongoing dialog and ‘relate’ to your companion characters.”
A recent report published in the Wall Street Journal by Julian De Freitas, Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Marketing Unit and Director of the Ethical Intelligence Lab, Harvard Business School, studied AI companions and loneliness. The research revealed that of the study cohort using a companion, “they reported a significant decrease in loneliness, showing an average reduction of 16 percentage points over the course of the week…. Participants who interacted with the AI companion experienced 14 percentage points less loneliness on average from day to day, compared with those who had no interaction.”
With approximately 100 million messages already sent, Dippy AI users spend an average of one hour plus with their companions.
“If you suffered a trauma and wake up scared in the middle of the night, it can be very comforting to chat at 3am with your Dippy AI companion,” said Angad Arneja, Dippy COO.
“We don’t like imposing our personal values on our users, people you meet in real life aren’t sanitized and Dippy AI allows users to interact with characters who are not sanitized either.”
Dippy AI Features, LLMs and the Team
Dippy features include:
- Anime-styled characters that are described and conjured up by users, with unique background stories and qualities.
- The app is colorful, animated and provides full screen illustrations
- Built as native iOS and Android apps.
- Suggests messages to help users in their conversations
- Follows Apple App Store guidelines with over -17 permission, and offers an NSFW setting
- Recently added a chain-of-thought feature so a user can understand how the companion came to a conclusion or why it expressed a particular idea.
Powered by a custom LLM, Dippy AI is the result of a merger of open-sourced models fine-tuned for empathy and roleplay. Roleplay LLMs are currently the biggest consumer use-case of AI and Dippy is working to create SOTA open-source roleplay LLM on Bittensor.
Co-founders Akshat Jagga and Angad Arneja met at the University of Toronto and were two of six co-founders of a popular lip synching app called Wombo, which quickly scaled to 150 million users, $12m in funding and continues today.
Jagga and Arneja left Wombo planning to create a productivity tool. They abandoned this as they discovered this intriguing opportunity in the AI proactive companion space.
“At the end of the day, people want to find communities and feel comfortable sharing where they are not being judged. That’s what we are doing,” Arneja said.
About Dippy AI
Dippy AI is a character AI app that empowers users to create companion characters with custom personalities, back stories and other attributes.
Dippy companions are interactive and have persistent memories so they know about their human partners. An open-sourced, mobile-first app, Dippy is also uncensored and unfiltered so users may confide whatever personal issues, secrets, and hopes they wish to share.
