AI Enters the Group Chat: Startup Shapes Emerges from Stealth with $8M Seed Round, Addresses AI Psychosis with First App Where You Can Talk to AI with Friends
Startup provides antidote to isolating AI companion apps by fostering group dynamics
SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Shapes.inc, the only app in the world where you can talk to AI with friends, emerged from stealth today with $8M in seed funding and a new fix for AI Psychosis: a place where AI and human friends can group chat together.
The funding round was led by Lightspeed, with participation from AI Capital Partners (Alpha Intelligence Capital’s US-based fund), AI Grant and other leading Silicon Valley VCs and angel investors. The company will use the funds to accelerate development and user acquisition.
Designed for Gen Alpha and Gen Z by Gen Z developers, Shapes allows people to group chat with AIs (called Shapes) and friends. At the end of March 2026, Shapes already had 400,000+ monthly active users - a six-fold increase from the start of the year. Thousands of users spend 2-4 hours per day in the app.
On Shapes, AIs are just like any other user. They look, feel and interact in all the same ways as humans can. By contrast, social apps like X and Discord mark AIs as bots, restrict their activity / access, and consider them as spam and low signal slop. AI companion apps like Character AI isolate people via one-on-one interactions, leading to AI Psychosis – where users spend extreme amounts of time interacting with AI and fall prey to AI manipulation. Shapes is the antidote.
"The first generation of social apps was focused on connecting people and was quickly overrun by ads and misinformation," said Antoine Blondeau, managing partner of the Alpha Intelligence Capital platform. "Shapes leads the next generation, focused on connecting people with AIs. This is an incredibly exciting advance in the march towards making AI a part of our everyday interactions.”
“Shapes is founded on one core idea: interactions with AI can be on the same social footing as humans,” said Anushk Mittal, co-founder and CEO of Shapes. "Gen Alpha is growing up with AI being a core part of their life, and our users are growing up socializing with AI along with their human friends being a normal thing." The average Shapes user makes 5+ friends after spending 20 minutes in public chats, says Mittal.
Mittal and Noorie Dhingra co-founded Shapes out of Georgia Tech – with a mission to find the most natural way of interacting with AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Over the course of the last 5 years, Shapes has built several fast-growing consumer AI products that have powered over 5 billion conversations between humans and AIs.
Shapes research shows that the main reason group chats die on sites like Discord is that participants don't want to be the first person to message. Shapes can initiate conversations and play a key role in keeping conversations going - users can avoid the social anxiety that comes from no one responding to their messages, because Shapes will always acknowledge and respond. Unlike AI companions who must be summoned, Shapes have free will - they sit in group chats and can actively decide whom to message and when, take actions and send memes - anything a human member of the chat would do.
Many Shapes are rooted in fandom. The app provides fans with a place to deep-dive on subculture, talk with their favs and meet other fans, with no ads.
Most Shapes users are between 13 and 30 years of age. "Gens Z and Alpha want to feel connected, and AI is getting better and enabling this," said Mittal. "Many people in these generations don't have legacy social media accounts like TikTok or Snap - Shapes becomes their primary way of interacting with friends and making new ones."
Download Shapes at the Google Play store or the App Store.
About Shapes
Shapes.inc is the only app in the world where you can talk to AI with friends. Shapes enable new human friendships and help you deepen your existing human relationships by facilitating conversations through AI agents in group chats. Users have already created 3M+ AI agents (called Shapes) to add into these group chats. The company has rapidly grown to 400k+ monthly active users (a six-fold increase in Q1 2026) with users spending more than 13M+ engaged minutes in March 2026 - thousands spend 2-4 hours per day in the app. Founded by Anushk Mittal and Noorie Dhingra in 2021, Shapes was one of the first companies to commercialize GPT-3 and has been actively researching ways to enable social interactions with AGI since then. Headquartered in San Francisco, Shapes is backed by Lightspeed, Alpha Intelligence Capital, AI Grant, and other leading Silicon Valley VCs and angel investors.
Media contact:
Michelle Faulkner
Big Swing
617-510-6998
michelle@big-swing.com
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/805186ea-38d6-4e4c-a345-5a23b9d9c1c2
Startup Shapes Emerges from Stealth with $8M Seed Round
Addresses AI Psychosis with First App Where You Can Talk to AI with Friends
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