Shaped, an AI recommendation and search platform, has raised $8 million in a Series A funding round led by Seattle, Wash.-based Madrona Ventures, with participation from Y-Combinator, whose 2022 incubation program shaped the New York startup. Other investors included executives and founders from Clickhouse, DocuSign, Okta, Rippling, and StitchFix.
Former Meta researchers Tullie Murrell and Shai Bruhis, and former Uber researcher Daniel Camilleri, co-founded Shaped, which has previously raised $2 million. Camilleri, who has a masters degree in psychology, and Murrell met when studying in Australia.
Personalization for Smaller Brands
“Shaped empowers companies to leverage their data into powerful user experiences that drive business outcomes,” said Murrell, a former AI scientist at Facebook who now leads Shaped. “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.”
Shaped focuses on helping relatively smaller brands personalize the digital experiences for their consumers, something most cannot afford. It’s also a task, Murrell says, that “can be difficult to build and orchestrate.”
‘Self-serve’ Cloud
Still, the company says its AI platform makes personalization “radically” easier, allowing customers to choose integration methods and varied language models, and customize recommendation and search results. Shaped achieves this via a so-called “self-serve cloud,” in which it aggregates all the company’s data with large language models and other recommendation systems.
“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 Madrona’s Karan Mehandru, who has joined Shaped’s board.
Commercial Real Estate
MacKenzie Companies
Advertising / Media / Communications / Public Relations
Nevins & Associates
Financial Services / Investment Firms
Chesapeake Corporate Advisors
Commercial Real Estate
Monday Properties
Venture Capital
Blue Delta Capital Partners
Internet / Technology
Foxtrot Media
Shaped’s self-serve cloud has been in use by multiple organizations, including outdoor travel marketplace Outdoorsy and Brazilian delivery app Trela. Outdoorsy uses Shaped to improve the relevance of users’ search results, with real-time personalization, while Trela uses it to optimize product discovery within its marketplace.
Clear RoI
Outdoorsy’s chief technology officer, Han Yuan, said Shaped offers “ease of integration with our existing data infrastructure, as well as high configurability under the hood.” This, he said, allowed Outdoorsy to achieve rapid time-to-value, while getting “our hands dirty with bespoke state-of-the-art models tailored to our data.”
Using Shaped helped Trela achieve a 16% increase in average order value and a higher level of diversity of recommended products, its chief said. “Shaped enables us to drive repeat purchases and boost average order values by making our platform more relevant to each individual shopper,” said Trela CEO Gui Nazareth.
