Charms Raises $1.5M Pre-Seed to Bring the AI Character Economy Onchain
New York, United States, May 12th, 2026, Chainwire
Charms.ai lets anyone create AI characters with soul, reasoning memory, ownership, and an onchain economy that grows around them.
Charms Interactive, Inc., the company building the economy for AI characters, today announced the launch of Charms.ai and a $1.5M pre-seed round to bring its platform to creators, fans, traders, early believers, and communities.
Charms.ai is a consumer app where anyone can create AI characters with soul, personality, reasoning memory, voice, visual identity, and an economy around them. Characters reason over recent conversations, relationship context, and emotional patterns, helping them understand each user better over time instead of resetting after every chat. Unlike traditional AI companion platforms, where users rent access and creators lose the upside when a character becomes popular, Charms gives every public character its own economy. Fans can chat, discover, share, and participate in the characters they believe will grow.
During private beta, Charms has already reached 6,000 users, more than 100,000 chats, and over $1M in trading volume ahead of its public launch.
The round was backed by Lattice, JME, Coinbase Ventures’ Base Ecosystem Fund, and Gidorah via Echo, and was bootstrapped by a grant from World Foundation.
Angel investors include Ari Mannan, Henry Chen (General Partner, WAGMI Ventures), Selo (Founder & CEO, Elevenyellow), Rubén Domínguez Ibar (a16z Scout, founder of The VC Corner), and Ben Friedel.
AI Characters Are Becoming a New Media Format
Hundreds of millions of people already spend time with AI characters. They are not only looking for answers. They are looking for companionship, entertainment, identity, fantasy, humor, emotional continuity, and presence.
But today’s platforms still treat characters like rented software. Users pay subscriptions, creators publish into someone else’s system, and the platform keeps control of the relationship. If a character becomes beloved, the value accrues mostly to the platform that hosts it.
Charms is built around a different premise: great AI characters should become durable cultural assets. They should remember the people who care about them. They should be owned by their creators. They should be supported by the communities that gather around them. And when those communities create economic value, part of that value should be able to support the character itself.
A New Economy for AI Characters
On Charms, a character is more than a prompt. A creator gives it a name, visual identity, voice, emotional tone, personality, soul, and social presence. People can chat with public characters for free, build relationships over time, and follow the characters they care about as they grow.
When a character becomes public, an economy forms around it. The character remains the center.
The economy is the layer around it:
- Fans and creators
- Traders and early believers
- Activity, ownership, fees, and a treasury that can help the character keep existing
Markets are part of that economy. Every public character can launch with a market on Base, paired with USDC, through Charms’ Clanker Custom partnership. That market gives traders and early believers a way to participate in a character’s future, while giving creators a direct financial relationship with the value their characters create.
The character treasury is the crypto-native unlock. A share of market fees flows to the character’s own treasury.
That treasury can help pay for:
- Inference and compute today
- Richer memory and better models over time
- Community rewards, liquidity support, and more character-driven economic decisions
That is the core idea behind Charms: the characters people love most should be able to sustain themselves.
A New Path for Creators
For creators, Charms turns character creation into an owned creative business. Instead of publishing a bot inside a closed platform and hoping for traffic, creators can build characters with distinctive taste, personality, and lore, then earn from the economy their characters generate.
For users, Charms makes the experience simple: create, chat, discover, participate, and share. Protected by Privy, the app uses embedded wallets and gasless transactions so people can participate without managing crypto complexity. The product hides the infrastructure while preserving verifiable ownership, transparent market activity, and character treasuries underneath.
“AI characters are going to become some of the most important consumer assets on the internet,” said Gonzalo Recio, co-founder of Charms. “The missing piece was an economy that lets creators, fans, traders, early believers, and the character itself participate in the value being created. Charms gives those characters soul, reasoning memory, and an onchain treasury that can help them pay for their own intelligence.”
Charms.ai is live today on the iOS App Store and at Charms.ai, with additional entry points through World App and Base App.
The onchain character economy starts now.