Convai is a conversational AI infrastructure company for virtual worlds, founded in April 2022 by Purnendu Mukherjee and Prashant Mishra and based in San Jose, California. Mukherjee previously worked as a deep learning engineer at NVIDIA on conversational AI and 3D avatar work, and the company raised a $5 million seed round in September 2022.
Convai ships as an SDK and API that plugs into Unreal Engine and Unity, giving non-player characters multimodal perception, sight and hearing, plus voice, gesture, and memory across a conversation rather than scripted dialogue trees. Developers upload knowledge documents and personality settings per character, and Convai handles the speech recognition, language model reasoning, and text-to-speech pipeline behind each NPC.
The tool is built for game studios, XR developers, and enterprise simulation teams rather than casual users, with over 1,000 studios and indie developers building on it since launch. Pricing runs Free for prototyping, $29 a month for the Indie Dev tier, up through $1,199 a month for Business, with custom Enterprise and revenue-share Partner plans for larger deployments.









