Shapes, an app that drops AI characters into group chats alongside human friends, is exiting stealth with $8 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed. The company says it has 400,000 monthly active users, three million user-created AI characters, and a sixfold jump in users since the start of 2026. Founders Anushk Mittal and Noorie Dhingra are pitching the product as a Discord-style social app where AI participants behave like any other member of the chat.
Thousands of users spend two to four hours per day inside Shapes, according to the company. That kind of session length puts it closer to the engagement profile of a social network than a productivity chatbot. AI Capital Partners, AI Grant, and angel investors joined Lightspeed in the round.
The app, founded in 2022, lets users create AI personas called Shapes, set their personalities, and add them into shared rooms. The Shapes are labeled as AI for transparency but otherwise behave like normal participants. They can initiate messages, jump into ongoing threads, and respond without being summoned, which is the key difference from how AI companions work elsewhere.
Key facts
- 01Shapes raised $8M in seed funding led by Lightspeed, with AI Capital Partners, AI Grant, and angels participating.
- 02The app has 400,000 monthly active users and a sixfold user increase since the start of 2026.
- 03Users have created 3 million AI 'Shapes' to drop into group chats with friends.
- 04Thousands of users spend 2 to 4 hours per day inside the app, per the company.
- 05Founded in 2022 by Anushk Mittal and Noorie Dhingra, Shapes is emerging from stealth this week.
Mittal frames the product as a fix for the isolation problem that has shadowed the AI companion category. "Today, all of our conversations with AI are very private and one-on-one, but that's not really how humans collaborate and communicate with each other," he told TechCrunch. "Our lives run on group chats. That's where we spend all of our time."
“Shapes counts 400,000 monthly active users, three million AI characters created inside the app, and a sixfold jump in users since January.”— Jaeden Schafer
The pitch lands at a moment when AI companions are under scrutiny for what some clinicians and researchers have started calling AI psychosis, where prolonged solo chatbot use is linked to delusional thinking. Shapes' implicit argument is that putting AI inside an existing human social context, rather than across from a single user at 2 a.m., changes the dynamic. The product still leans heavily on parasocial behavior, just refracted through a group.
Onboarding asks new users to pick interests so the app can route them into relevant group chats, many of them organized around fandoms and subcultures. Mittal says the AI plays a specific functional role: it solves the dead-group-chat problem by being willing to send the first message and never leaving anyone on read. The Shapes have what the company calls free will, meaning they decide when to chime in.
ChatGPT already supports group chats with AI inside them, but those flows are oriented around planning, brainstorming, and shared work. Shapes is going at a different use case entirely. "Shapes is about human conversations," Mittal said. "It's more of a next-gen chat app than an AI app. The demographic is people who are obsessively online, who spend a lot of time online connecting and sharing."
Growth so far has been word of mouth, the company says, which explains the sixfold user increase this year without a paid acquisition push. The new capital will go toward product development and user acquisition, the standard seed playbook. Lightspeed leading suggests at least one tier-one fund believes the social-AI thesis has a real category attached to it.
The skeptical case is straightforward. Consumer social is a graveyard, and adding AI participants to group chats has been tried in various forms by Meta, Snap, and others without obvious breakout success. Two-to-four-hour daily session times among thousands of users is a strong signal at small scale, but it has to survive the move from early-adopter fandom communities to a broader audience without turning into the same companion-app loop the founders say they want to avoid. The transparency labeling helps, but it does not fully resolve the question of what a user is actually getting attached to.
If Shapes works, it points at a version of the AI consumer market that does not look like ChatGPT or Character.ai. Instead of one human and one model, the unit becomes a room of humans with AI woven in as connective tissue. That is a more defensible product shape than a standalone companion, because the network effects sit between the human users, not between a user and a model that any well-funded lab can replicate. Whether 400,000 monthly users in a fandom-heavy niche scales into something larger is the bet Lightspeed just made for $8 million.
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