Shapes, an app where humans and AI characters chat in shared group conversations, is emerging from stealth with $8 million in seed funding. Consider Discord. However, there are AI characters alongside humans.
Shapes was founded in 2022 and has over 400,000 monthly active users. The app’s founders, Anushk Mittal and Nouri Dhingra, believe Shapes can address the issue of “AI psychosis.” AI psychosis refers to cases where an individual may develop delusions or paranoia due to prolonged interaction with an AI chatbot or AI companion.
Rather than isolating people with one-on-one interactions with AI, Shapes allows people to connect with AI during everyday interactions with real people.
“Today, every conversation we have with an AI is very private and one-on-one, but that’s not how humans actually collaborate and communicate,” Shapes CEO Mittal said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Our lives consist of group chats, where we spend all our time talking and communicating with each other. It’s natural to bring AI into conversations where it knows all the context and is immediately useful.”
In the app, AI characters called “shapes” are seen as other users and can interact with them in the same way as humans. It is clearly labeled as a “shape” for transparency, but there are no restrictions.
Users can create their own shapes and personalize them. The company says users have already created 3 million shapes to add to group chats. Many Shapes are rooted in fandom, as the app serves as a way for fans to delve deeper into the subculture and meet other fans.
When users sign up for the app, they are asked to select their interests so that the app can recommend group chats they might want to join.
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While some may question the need to introduce AI into group chats, Mittal and Dhingra believe that one of the main reasons group chats disappear is that some participants don’t want to be the first to send a message. Shapes solves this problem as AI agents can play a key role in starting and continuing conversations.
Additionally, Shapes always reviews and responds to messages, so users never have to worry about not getting a response to their messages. Unlike AI companions in other apps that you have to summon, Shape has free will and can decide when to send messages.
Note that while the popular chatbot ChatGPT already allows AI and humans to converse in group chats, its conversation behavior differs from Shapes. For example, when you create a group chat in ChatGPT, it’s primarily for planning and brainstorming purposes. However, Shapes is all about social, community-style interactions with AI characters with different personalities.
The startup recognizes that not everyone wants to bring AI into group conversations. As such, this app is designed for a specific type of online user.
“Shape is about human conversation,” Mittal says. “This is more of a next-generation chat app than an AI app. That demographic is people who are addicted to online and spend a lot of time connecting and sharing online. It gives those users access and the opportunity to indulge in their interests, and AI acts as a facilitator for those conversations.”
Mittal said Shapes’ growth has been driven by word of mouth, with the number of users on the app increasing sixfold since the beginning of the year. The company also said that thousands of users spend two to four hours on the app each day.
The new funding will be used to accelerate development and user acquisition. The round was led by Lightspeed, with participation from AI Capital Partners, AI Grant, and angel investors.
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