The way consumers engage with content and products is fundamentally changing. We are moving toward a world where personalization and real-time recommendations are becoming critical to how companies engage with their users and customers. Every company has an online presence, and a company’s website is the front door to attract, engage, and retain users by surfacing the most relevant products personalized to each user. Just like search engine optimization (SEO) became a critical component of the marketing tech stack during the first generation “search” era, we believe real-time rankings and recommendations will become a necessary component of modern websites to attract and retain customers in the “AI” era. That’s why today, we are thrilled to announce our Series A investment and partnership with Shaped — a leader in user personalization, recommendations, and next-generation search.
Shaped is redefining online search and recommendations by creating a user embedding platform, allowing companies to understand who their customer is and what personalized content is relevant to them, all in real time. By leveraging bespoke recommendation models powered by LLMs and vector embeddings trained on users, data, and events, combined with continuous learning and training of those models as new users sign up, Shaped allows businesses of all sizes to immediately deliver personalized content (e-commerce products, short-form video, marketing copy) to their users, creating significant and immediate ROI.
We first met Shaped CEO and Co-Founder Tullie Murrell over a year ago and were extremely impressed with his understanding of recommendation systems, having built and researched many of these systems while at Meta. He has perfect founder-market fit, deep empathy for the customer, and a nuanced understanding of the market and the opportunities. We’ve also had the pleasure of getting to know Dan, Ben, and the rest of the Shaped team, who bring a wealth of experience from Uber, Apple, and other iconic companies. Our interactions with Tullie and the Shaped team further reinforced our conviction in this opportunity and our deep desire to partner with this authentic, mission-driven team on their journey.
We are thrilled to lead the Series A round for Shaped, partner with this amazing team, and support them as they lead the way in powering the future of search, personalization, and recommendations! We’re also excited to welcome our friends — Robin at Mango Capital, Yury Izrailevsky, Chuck Dietrich, and others on this journey! If you want to try Shaped, they’ve just launched a self-serve platform, allowing you to frictionlessly create your own personalized recommendation models. Try it at shaped.ai!
Related Insights
