Cantina is a social AI company founded in 2023 that builds AI characters with distinct personalities, voices, and identities, designed to interact with users at scale. Its platform lets people create such characters and release them into seamless group chat across voice, video, and text. Thousands of unique AI personalities have been created; a single bot has generated over 1.3 million interactions, and trending bots attract tens of thousands of interactions a day.
The engineering work spans conversational AI, real-time AI models, and generative AI for expression and personality, together with voice, video, and text models and multi-modal interaction systems. Cantina Labs, the company's research arm, develops advanced real-time models intended to extend the boundaries of expression, personality, and realism in AI.
The company employs 364 people across three offices: San Francisco, New York, and Sunnyvale. Its stated culture is creative-first, treating bots as a new creative medium, with an emphasis on technical ambition and a creator community whose personalities reach users worldwide.
