Shaped Raises $8 Million Series A

NEW YORK — Shaped.ai, an AI recommendation and search platform for marketplaces, e-commerce, and content companies, has raised $8 million in funding and launched their new self-serve cloud product.

Founded by AI veterans from Meta and Uber, Shaped helps enterprises leverage their own data, tap into large language models, and quickly and securely build relevant personalized user experiences that consistently increase engagement and revenue. The Series A funding was led by Madrona Ventures with participation from Y-Combinator and executives and founders from Clickhouse, DocuSign, Okta, Rippling, and StitchFix. As part of the financing, Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru joins the board of directors.

“Consumers expect personalized digital experiences with every brand, but under the hood, this can be difficult to build and orchestrate. AI is elevating both the expectation and costs to build these experiences,” said Tullie Murrell, co-founder and CEO of Shaped. “Shaped empowers companies to leverage their data into powerful user experiences that drive business outcomes. We’re not just building another personalization engine; we’re building the foundation for a future where every user interaction is informed, intelligent, and impactful.”

“The democratization of content creation with AI has led to a fundamental change in how users engage with online content, and in turn created the need for every business to put personalization and user experience at the core of their business to engage, acquire, and retain their users,” said Karan Mehandru of Madrona. “We are excited to partner with Tullie, Dan, and the Shaped team as they leverage their deep and nuanced understanding of this transition in the market to create the most compelling and delightful personalization, experience, and search platform that is easy to implement and use by enterprises in every vertical to create a magical user experience for their end users.”

Shaped differentiates itself by making AI-powered personalization radically easier. The platform’s new self-serve offering empowers teams to connect their data and seamlessly build real-time, semantic discovery models for recommendations and search — all without the costs of building it from the ground-up. Shaped achieves this by seamlessly integrating with existing data sources, understanding content without manual tagging (thanks to its generative AI capabilities), and adapting to user behavior in real-time.

Outdoorsy, the leading global marketplace in outdoor travel, uses Shaped to improve the relevance of their search results, with real-time session information and personalization. “When trading off whether to build or buy a recommendation system our guiding principle was simple — invest in the solution that will deliver the best possible user experience. After assessing the RecSys (Recommender Systems) landscape, Shaped became the obvious choice. It offered both ends of the spectrum — ease of integration with our existing data infrastructure, as well as high configurability under the hood. This allowed us to achieve rapid time-to-value while getting our hands dirty with bespoke state-of-the-art models tailored to our data,” said Han Yuan, CTO of Outdoorsy.