The rise of generative AI is changing the way stories are told and experienced. Instead of passively enjoying content, users can now take an active role in the narrative by creating original characters, steering the plot through live decisions, and building immersive worlds that evolve with their input.
Digital entertainment company Versa AI is exploring this space through its flagship product, Sekai, which gives users the tools to generate ongoing stories.
The goal isn’t only to entertain but to let people explore customized narratives that feel more personal and immersive, turning them from viewers into active participants.
Read on to learn more about Sekai and the minds behind it.
The Sekai Vision: Living Out Infinite Lives Through AI
Sekai’s central idea is simple: What if instead of simply watching a story play out, users could direct the experience themselves?
“Previously, all content was passive,” says founder Ziang Zhang. “Now, you can immerse yourself in it and experience it first-hand.”
Powered by generative AI, the same technology behind tools like ChatGPT, Sekai gives users the ability to create stories that unfold in real time. Instead of watching a fixed narrative, users can affect the outcome of the story through live choices and interactions. They can start a story from scratch or use one of thousands of templates to kickstart their ideas, making the experience deeply personal and endlessly customizable.
Sekai also offers intuitive tools like a character builder and a visual asset library, making it easy for users with limited creative backgrounds to shape their own worlds and stories. They can also share their narratives directly on the platform, inviting others to follow along, contribute, or branch off into new storylines as collaborative universes take form.
This is all part of what the Sekai team calls a “shared dream,” a way to imagine alternate lives, explore new identities, and tell stories that evolve with each decision.
The Founders Behind Sekai
The team behind Sekai brings together technical expertise in AI technology and the growth-minded leadership necessary to turn the platform into a global phenomenon.
Ziang Zhang
Sekai / Sekai
At the helm is CEO Ziang Zhang. After earning a computer science degree from Williams College, he joined Google as a software engineer, focusing on Android infrastructure just as the corporation was going all-in on mobile. But soon, the entrepreneurial spirit drew him away from the traditional career path, and he pivoted toward co-founding multiple startups with friends.
His first venture was an AI-powered fashion platform that grew to handle 20-50 million daily requests. This platform could identify what clothing celebrities were wearing in videos, allowing users to instantly find and shop for similar items.
Among his other ventures was a Latin American short-form video platform, which was later acquired by ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company). He also worked as the CEO for NCT Corporation, a music discovery app that applied TikTok’s algorithm-driven swipe interface to audio streaming, achieving over 80 minutes of daily engagement and reaching over 30 million users.
With Sekai, Zhang is focused on what he describes as the next shift in content consumption. “The ultimate goal is for you to experience endless lives — lives that you cannot experience in real life,” he says.
His hope, as he puts it, is for Sekai to be the platform that encourages the creativity of everyone and helps create the lives that fit users the most.
Yangchuan Deng
Yangchuan Deng / Yangchuan Deng
Sekai’s head of AI is Yangchuan Deng, whose fascination with what-if scenarios and alternate realities has inspired him to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI.
Following his time in college, where he worked with extended reality systems that leveraged image and audio generation, Deng joined Sekai as a founding member, hoping to help users experience fantasies otherwise inaccessible in real life.
“After watching Dune, I wanted to experience more of that universe but found the available content limited,” he explains. “When generative AI emerged, particularly with advances like DALL-E, I recognized its potential for creating customized fantasy experiences, leading me to dedicate my career to using generative AI to help people create different types of immersive content.”
As Sekai’s head of AI, Deng has taken the product from zero to one, developing the AI systems that support the platform. One of his biggest contributions was the platform’s multimodal, visual novel-style gameplay, and the technology he’s developed now powers the system’s core operations. “Our approach has influenced the broader industry,” Deng notes, “with competitors now attempting to replicate our interaction design.”
Deng sees current chatbot interfaces as a limited form of interaction and aims to innovate new ways for humans to interact with AI through immersive experiences. By advancing beyond text-based interactions into spatial computing and mixed reality, he hopes to engage users on multiple sensory levels with personalized experiences that adapt in real time.
Turning Viewers into World-Builders
Since launching in 2024, Sekai has attracted millions of creators and secured support from top venture firms, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), A* Capital, and Mayfield Fund. With nearly $10 million in funding, the team aims to continue scaling the platform’s infrastructure and deepening its AI capabilities.
As Zhang explains, “In the AI age, the new moat isn’t just users; it’s how well your product learns and improves.” In other words, the more people use Sekai, the more personalized and responsive it becomes, offering increasingly tailored experiences for its audience.
That adaptive intelligence will be key as the company pursues its larger vision of becoming the foremost place for immersive, generative content. Rather than competing with gaming, film, or social media, Sekai aims to blend elements of all three into something new: a convergence of content, community, and creation.
By combining the perspective of a seasoned entrepreneur and the technical expertise of an AI engineer, Versa AI is redefining what it means to experience a story. With Sekai, generative AI becomes a medium for personal expression, allowing users to shape narratives in real-time and tell stories that feel entirely their own.
If the last decade was about giving everyone a voice, this next one may be about giving everyone a world. And Sekai is pointing toward a new era of entertainment, one focused not on passive consumption but on active participation.
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