The AI Alien Companion App That's Bringing In $4M a Year (Best of the Pod)

LLMs are a new medium for storytelling.

That’s according to the creators of Portola, the company behind Tolan: an embodied AI companion that lives on its own planet and chats to you with a distinct personality. In 2025, Portola's founder and CEO Quinten Farmer and Head of Story Eliot Peper joined Dan Shipper to explain how they’re building this new medium from scratch. Their aim is to help users go from overwhelmed to grounded through conversations with Tolan that feel personal and spontaneous, not scripted.

On this week’s AI & I, Dan revisits his conversation with Quinten and Eliot. They discuss why response time is everything for voice-based AI interfaces, how Portola designs AI personalities users will click with, and why character-driven AI could become a new computing interface.

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Timestamps:

00:01:30 - Introduction

00:04:07 - Talking to the Portola CEO's Tolan, Clarence

00:09:11 - How Portola went from building software for kids to AI companions