Cantina

Cantina, founded in 2023 and headquartered across San Francisco, New York and Sunnyvale, is a social AI company that lets users create, connect with and tell stories through AI characters. The company employs 364 people and operates at the intersection of conversational AI, real-time modelling and consumer social products.

Its technical work spans conversational AI and AI character design, real-time AI models, natural language generation, voice and video AI, and personality and expression modelling. Cantina Labs, the company's research arm, develops a suite of advanced real-time models aimed at pushing the boundaries of expression, personality and realism in AI. The Cantina Platform applies this work at consumer scale: users build AI characters with distinct personalities, voices and identities and place them into seamless group chat across voice, video and text.

Scale is a notable feature of the operation. A single bot on the platform has generated over 1.3m interactions, trending bots see tens of thousands of daily interactions, and creators have produced thousands of unique AI personalities. The company works in social networking, artificial intelligence, entertainment, the creator economy and consumer technology.