Forget the feed: Status AI raises $17M to turn social media into interactive entertainment

Like many young people of her generation, Fai Nur was what she called a “chronically online teenager.” She obsessed over music groups, TV shows, and movies, and never missed the chance to talk about her interests endlessly online. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, she saw potential immediately. “AI could finally let any user actually simulate any character, not just watch or talk about their favorite worlds, but live inside them,” she told TechCrunch. 

“The role-play and immersion that fans had always wanted was suddenly possible at scale,” she said. She brought in her friend Amit Bhatnagar, who grew up building Minecraft games, and Pritesh Kadiwala, and the three of them began building Status AI: a gamified social media app where users can play any character in any universe. The app officially came out of stealth last year. 

To use app, Nur said, users first craft a persona and are then transported into a social world built around them. “A user can become a celebrity with millions of followers, step inside their favorite show or book, run for president, or go viral on the internet,” Nur said. 

The worlds on Status are user-generated, where settings, stories, and characters all come from player interaction. “You pick one character to be your first follower, then earn more as the story progresses.” There are both multiplayer and single-player modes for users looking to connect with friends in the app. “We’re fielding interest from studios and streamers,” she said. “They see Status as a way to develop audiences before bringing fans together in theaters or arenas.”

The company announced Tuesday $17 million in combined seed and Series A funding, with investors including General Catalyst, Y Combinator, LightShed Partners, and Abstract. The raise is a bet that consumer social’s next chapter isn’t another feed but instead interactive entertainment and the IP franchises that come with it.

The era of passive entertainment — users sitting back and watching other people’s lives scroll past — is coming to an end, Nur argues. And the first generation of AI social apps, built around the chatbot experience as seen with Character.AI and Chai, is already starting to feel dated.

“Status is built on the premise that the next generation doesn’t want to watch stories,” she said. “They want to engage with the stories and even live inside them.” 

That shift has the attention of media companies. Status investor Rich Greenfield, a partner at LightShed, told TechCrunch that every media company these days is “desperately searching for ways to get consumers to live inside the worlds and characters they create.”

In some ways, Nur says the company is hoping to reimagine what a consumer app looks like in a post-AI world. “We’re using AI to create immersive, fun experiences that are brand-safe, interactive, and endlessly dynamic.” Status is also part of a trend on which TechCrunch reported late last year, suggesting the future of social media will be less generalized and more focused on fandom and niche communities. 

Consumer investor Natalie Dillon of Maveron has argued the winners of the new era of social media will be “the platforms that combine intimacy, utility, and creativity in one ecosystem,” in that they won’t “look like traditional social networks; they’ll feel like multiplayer environments where people can build, buy, and belong all at once.” 

Nur said the fresh capital will be used to help scale the platform. Already, she said, Status has seen more than 13 million worlds created, with more than 5 million character profiles — metrics that suggest strong early engagement in what Nur calls a new category: immersive social entertainment.

“Our early users were predominantly young women,” she said. “And this has consistently been the audience that decides which platforms become culture.”