Announcing Our $3.9M Seed Round to Build Immersive AI Companions

TL;DR

• We raised a $3.9M Seed Round led by Mechanism Capital and Karatage to build uncensored and immersive AI companions.
• Nectar will be the most powerful platform to create AI agents, combining open source technology with customized finetunes to bring industry leading customizations in image generation, textual inference, video creation, and voice
• An in-house incentive program was recently launched to help all users familiarize themselves with different aspects of our product.

Today, Nectar is one of the leading consumer generative AI platforms allowing users to create high quality AI companions within seconds. However, just a year ago, our journey looked wildly different. Try creating your AI companion.

We first began tinkering on initial ideas in AI early last year, shortly after the advent of Chat GPT and just as image diffusion models hit the market and started to gain popularity. As we browsed through endless pages of custom image models people were releasing, we were in awe of the sheer volume of unique creative expression. Each model produced distinctly different results, some were anime oriented, while others were hyper-realistic.

We envisioned a future where someone would easily be able to use different foundational models and their respective customizations to generate images where every single artistic decision was a modular component generated by AI. However, closed source proprietary models often had stringent regulatory guidelines, which limited creative freedom. With the danger of centralized and closed-source AI becoming an increasing reality, we felt drawn to build not only in order to combat the risks of censored intelligence, but also to allow users to easily express themselves using the latest AI developments.

Starting with the image space, we interviewed numerous different AI image creators to get a better understanding of their different workflows and their motivations behind their contributions. One problem was made obvious – they wanted others to recognize their talent and work and to always have access to the latest technology. These artists were enthusiasts that only made money via tipjar donations, and they wanted a central place for others to realize the value of their contributions. Furthermore, as newer models were published, they could no longer continue to create the best possible assets since they oftentimes required more compute. Several things became obvious to us:

1. User Limitations - People want to use cutting-edge AI for entertainment, but don't have the means/time to deal with complexities and restrictions.
2. Vibrant Communities are Missing - Creators wanted a platform to show off and highlight different creations they produced.
3. Cold Start Problem - No creators would come if there weren’t already ample users for them to spend time making content.
4. Expansion Beyond Diffusion Models - Even though image models were hyped, there were other models within AI that people were interested in customizing.

Initial prototypes of Nectar started to form in mid 2023, primarily aimed at solving 1 and 3 via an image generation platform. Our goal was to verify our thesis before we committed to anything by making a simple image engine serving a few different image styles that gave just enough flexibility to allow users to create anything (as long as it was legal) and bring their dream images to life. Users quickly realized that this was a far superior experience compared to using other alternatives at the time, which only furthered our conviction. Try creating your AI companion.

As our platform continued to grow in user count, it became increasingly obvious that 2 and 4 were soon doable. We soon expanded the amount of features offered on the platform to beyond just images, launching our customized roleplay and fantasy product in early Q3 2023, and our now flagship companion product in Q1 2024.

Nectar AI is an easy to use platform for users to create immersive AI experiences. As it stands today, while there is a large demand for smart responsive agents, user incentives are misaligned, and existing solutions are limited through text only interfaces, which are legacy formats for immersion. By expanding into more in-depth modalities like video, voice, and later on haptics and AR/VR, Nectar will serve as the de-facto place for creating the most lifelike AI assets. Try creating your AI companion.

We’re thrilled to share with you all that we raised a $3.9 Million Seed Round to build out our goal of creating an uncensored and decentralized AI future. Led by Mechanism Capital and Karatage, with participation from Synergis, Maelstrom, Builder Capital , Baboon, Decima, and other well-known figures in the crypto space, this funding round will serve as our initial launchpad to bring about powerful AI agents to the masses.

We are on a mission to allow users to create and interact with AI companions that feel indistinguishable from reality. Our belief is that users should not only be able to permissionlessly access uncensored AI, but also be incentivized for their creations as well. Already, users can create and customize characters and fantasies at a level of depth unmatched by other platforms, evidenced by the fact that Nectar companions can automatically detect intent and respond appropriately with images, video, or text all within seconds. Try creating your AI companion.

In less than 9 months after launching our core companion product, we’ve already been able to onboard over 500,000 users, and signs of growth are not slowing down. In an age where everyone is trying to find the next big ‘consumer app in crypto’, we’re extremely excited to be building in such a fast moving environment, and have already onboarded these half million users on chain by providing them with embedded wallets. Recent grants from various L1 foundations also enable sponsored transactions to make initial on-chain interactions feel seamless and smooth.

At present, Nectar continues to push towards all the difficulties of building in the fast growing consumer AI and crypto space. Our roadmap is ambitious and exciting, and ranges from contextual multimodal improvements and synthetically improved memory to onchain interactions and decentralized inference. We will soon expand beyond our initial niche of romantic intimacy, and are striving towards a future of highly immersive AI agent interaction for everyday users which will incorporate both on and offchain capabilities.

Currently, you can join over half a million users in creating your own Nectar Companion at https://nectar.ai and participating in our Nectar Rewards Program. We’ve carefully designed this Rewards Program (more details here) to highlight different quests that you can complete to get a better sense of the different avenues within our product, whether that’s in image and video creation, or fantasy storytelling.

We’ll be sharing more information about Nectar in the coming weeks and months, and in the meantime, you can stay connected with us by following us on X and joining our Discord!

See you in the Nectarverse,

Keccak and Zi