When AI erotic companion startup Oh raised a $4.5m funding round in January, it had something few in the shadowy new sector could boast. A roster of named investors, publicly backing the company.
VCs are often bound by “vice clauses”, which prohibit firms from investing in controversial products like pornography or weapons. As a result, startups working on ethically contentious products often rely on angel investors and family offices to stay afloat.
But Oh, which generates NSFW adult content and conversations with both fictional characters as well as bots based on real people, has tapped into a group of seemingly less squeamish investors: crypto VCs.
It’s drawn backing from the likes of Tangent, Kosmos Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Bodhi Ventures and Tagus Capital.
“Raising money for a business like this from non-crypto VCs is very difficult,” says Oh founder and CEO Nic Young, who positions the startup as a “decentralised platform” and offers payments via crypto.
“A lot of crypto VCs don’t have vice clauses — it’s more liberal and free.”
Oh wants to use those fresh funds to build the “AI OnlyFans”, with plans to roll out autonomous scantily clad bots that can market themselves on social media and direct message users with spicy conversation starters.
The biggest challenge? Convincing enough users it’s not that weird turning to AI when you’re looking for romance.
AI OnlyFans
Visit Oh’s website and you’ll be met with profile photos of half-naked AI bots, the majority of which are women.
Most of them are AI-generated and entirely fictional, but some are what Young calls “digital twins” of real people, typically adult content creators who have licensed their likeness to the site and take an 80% cut of the cash generated by their likeness.
To start making money through Oh, content creators will send dozens of images of themselves and answer a 50-question survey through voice messages to train the startup’s AI.
That’s been built using open source models including Stable Diffusion, which UK startup Stability AI helped build, Flux from German startup Black Forest Labs and Meta’s Llama. Oh also uses ElevenLabs tech to generate voice replies from bots.
Users can send WhatsApp-style messages to AI love interests and receive AI-generated texts, voice messages and pictures. Those replies can range from SFW (safe for work) to sex acts, depending on what the user asks for.
“Oh is the AI OnlyFans,” says Young. “What Oh is trying to build is automating every aspect of content creators’ revenue streams.”
Since Oh’s launch in October last year, it says it has had 140k users (65% men and 35% women) across the globe.
A growing number of startups have been building AI erotic companions since around 2023.
Romania’s DreamGF told Sifted in September that year that it was making $100k a month shortly after launching. Others, including London-based Kupid AI and Anima, Prague-headquartered FantasyGF and Malta-based Candy.ai have also cropped up in the past two years.
But in the past 12 months there’s been a step change in the capabilities of AI models to deliver a more realistic experience to users, says Young, who adds that the tech has improved “immeasurably” over the past year.
“Image, voice and video generation are the biggest improvements,” he tells Sifted. “Video wasn’t possible at all at the beginning of 2024 — people would grow extra limbs — and images looked airbrushed. That’s changing now — it’s getting indistinguishable from real content.”
Oh plans to launch AI generated video content on its platform this year.
Dystopian future or net positive?
Critics of AI romantic partners say that they could reinforce damaging stereotypes about women and contribute to unhealthy attitudes in men.
FantasyGF founder Martin Galovic told Sifted last year that he wasn’t blind to the idea that companies like his are potentially creating a strange future for intimacy and relationships.
“It’s very dystopian,” he said. “The consequences of this could be bad, if people just disconnect from each other.”
But Young tells Sifted he thinks AI romantic partners will be a “net positive” for society.
“If the alternative is people consuming other forms of adult content or not having any other form of companionship at all, then I would rather something that’s synthetic and controlled,” he says.
While users can indulge in most sexual fantasies with Oh’s bots, they’re blocked from generating any illegal practices, such as child abuse.
Oh is currently making “five figures” in revenue each month (just 3% of its users currently pay) but sees big potential for agentic AI — an emerging technology capable of performing a variety of tasks without human supervision — as it looks to convince more users to buy into synthetic girlfriends.
“AI agents have the ability to not just react to what a user says, but take their own proactive actions to message users — like asking them how their day is going,” Young tells Sifted, adding that Oh’s first agents could be released by the end of Q1 this year. He hopes agents could be used to autonomously market Oh’s bots on social media in the future.
“Any new innovation can feel like a drastic change,” Young says. “I don’t think it’s weird — it’s an evolution.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/ai-onlyfans-erotic-companions/
