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• Nectar AI secures $3.9 million seed funding to scale team and expand AI companionship platform.
• The platform boasts 500,000+ users creating uncensored, customizable AI companions and stories in realistic or anime styles.
• Nectar AI plans to launch a protocol for on-chain AI agents, enabling user ownership and monetization of created companions.

Nectar AI, an immersive artificial intelligence (AI) companionship platform, has secured $3.9 million in seed funding, the company announced today. 

The round was co-led by Mechanism Capital and Karatage, with additional investments from Synergis, Maelstrom (Arthur Hayes), Builder Capital, Baboon, and Decima. Prominent angel investors in the round include Tekin Salimi and George Lambeth of Dao5, Albert Chon, co-founder of Injective, Charles Lu, co-founder of Espresso Systems, Gabby Dizon, co-founder of YGG, among other notable figures in the crypto industry.

The proceeds will be used to scale the team with several key hires on both the AI and protocol side, as well as increase capacity for new partnerships and affiliates.

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Nectar AI’s mission is to allow users to create and interact with AI companions that feel indistinguishable from reality. Leveraging the latest developments in generative AI and Web3, Nectar AI allows users to create uncensored & replicable multimodal AI companions in either a realistic or anime style. Users can customize their characters at a level of depth unmatched by other platforms, by detecting user intent and responding appropriately with images or text within seconds. 

Generative AI video creation is also available on the platform, with more in-depth video and voice messages coming soon. In the future, users will be able to port their created companions onchain, giving them full IP ownership of their assets and the ability to monetize them permissionlessly.

Currently, over 500,000 users on the platform create both AI stories and companions, which allows storytellers to create rich and dynamic role-playing experiences that can range from medieval adventures to different encounters. Companions are AI-generated agents that can star in any of these stories, similar to casting an actress for a movie.

Keccak and Zi, the co-founders of Nectar AI, first met at Stanford and began working on the project in August 2023. Prior, Keccak helped start a prominent AI & crypto fund and Zi made significant contributions to realistic synthetic facial generation at Meta and L1 Blockchains. Nectar is set on developing a new protocol set to be released later this year to enable the financialization of on-chain AI agents.