Shaped
Shaped is an AI-native real-time context engine that unifies retrieval, ranking, and continuous learning to power personalized search, feeds, and agentic AI workflows for e-commerce, marketplace, media, and social platforms. It serves enterprises and growth-stage companies via Shaped Cloud SaaS with a SQL-based query interface and 30+ data connectors.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2022
- HeadquartersNew York, United States
- Headcount11–50
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
What Shaped does
Shaped (shaped.ai Inc.) is an AI-native real-time context engine that unifies retrieval, ranking, and continuous learning for personalization, search, and agentic AI workflows. The platform is organized as a three-layer architecture: a Query Layer delivering sub-50ms ranked results via the proprietary ShapedQL SQL-based interface, an Intelligence Layer running transformer and neural ranking models with dynamic embeddings and continuous learning, and a Data Layer connecting to 30+ native sources including Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks, Kafka, Kinesis, Segment, and Amplitude. The product is delivered primarily as Shaped Cloud, a fully-managed SaaS offering with a self-serve tier ($100 free credits, $500/month platform minimum) and an enterprise tier with dedicated solution engineers, SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA compliance. A BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) deployment option is announced as forthcoming.
Shaped monetizes via flat-fee monthly subscriptions determined by usage (monthly active users, item counts, query volumes), with usage-based charges for data layer consumption at approximately $2/GB plus per-API-call query fees. The company employs a hybrid go-to-market motion combining product-led growth (self-serve cloud, parallel evaluation programs for migration from AWS Personalize) with enterprise field sales (white-glove setup, dedicated solution engineers). Customers span e-commerce (Batch, Trela, Dribbleup, Kogan, Checkmate), marketplaces (Sideline Swap, Outdoorsy, Breakr, Axis), media (NY Mag, Vox, Brandazine), social media (Atmosfy, Sune, Afterhour, Overlap, Supergreat), and prediction markets (Polymarket), with 18+ named customer logos and quantified case study outcomes including 2.5x engagement (NY Mag), +131% watch time (Supergreat), +79% Day-6 retention (Atmosfy), and 2.2x conversion (Brandazine).
The company was founded in 2021/2022 in Brooklyn, New York, and has raised approximately $10 million across a $1.9M seed round (April 2022, Y Combinator and Liquid 2 Ventures) and an $8M Series A (July 2024, led by Madrona Ventures). Tullie Murrell is the CEO. The platform scales to 1B+ documents and 100M+ users with sub-50ms latency and a 99.95% uptime SLA, and claims 59% cost savings and 10x faster iteration cycles versus AWS Personalize on comparable workloads.
Shaped firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Shaped
- Legal name
- shaped.ai Inc.
- Website
- https://shaped.ai
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2022
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 11–50 employees
- Short description
- Shaped is an AI-native real-time context engine that unifies retrieval, ranking, and continuous learning to power personalized search, feeds, and agentic AI workflows for e-commerce, marketplace, media, and social platforms. It serves enterprises and growth-stage companies via Shaped Cloud SaaS with a SQL-based query interface and 30+ data connectors.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Shaped industry classification
Industry- Product category
- AI Personalization and Recommendation Platform
- NAICS
- Software Publishers (5132)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Search, Retrieval & Semantic Ranking (BM25/vector, hybrid) (HDAAADAB)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Vector Databases & Knowledge Grounding (HDAAACAE), Enterprise AI Data & Knowledge Platforms (Vector Databases, Knowledge Graphs) (HDAEANAH)
Keywords
Where Shaped is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- New York
- HQ country
- United States
- HQ region
- North America
Offices1 record
Markets served
Shaped business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Technology or R&D, Personnel, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales, Operations
Revenue model
- Platform SaaS Subscription: Cloud software-as-a-service platform with flat-fee monthly pricing determined by usage. Monthly active users, item counts, and query volumes determine pricing. Supports monthly billing with annual discount options.
- Usage-based Query Pricing: Platform minimum of $500/month plus usage-based charges for data layer ($2/GB), intelligence layer for training, and query layer per API calls. Example: 12M requests/month at approximately $3,264 total monthly cost.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Freemium | Monthly | Self-serve Cloud with $100 free credits |
| Subscription | Monthly | Enterprise platform pricing |
| Subscription | Annual | Standard+ Plan with white-glove support |
Go-to-market motion2 records
Distribution channels3 records
Marketing channels5 records
Shaped product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Shaped builds an AI-native, real-time context engine delivered as a cloud SaaS platform that unifies retrieval, ranking, and continuous learning in a single query. The platform powers personalized feeds, hybrid search, agent memory/RAG retrieval, and product recommendations for e-commerce, marketplaces, media, social, and B2B SaaS companies, with sub-50ms latency, 30+ native data connectors, and built-in explainability.
Product overview
Shaped is an AI-native real-time context engine for personalization and relevance. The platform offers Shaped Cloud (fully-managed SaaS) as its primary product, with BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) as an upcoming self-hosted option. The core platform is organized around four main use cases: For You Feeds (personalized content feeds), Hybrid Search (semantic and keyword search), Agent Memory (RAG retrieval for AI agents), and various recommendation modules (Cart Upsell, Product Recommendations, Personalized Email). All capabilities are powered by ShapedQL, a SQL-based query interface, and the Signal Engine for declarative feature engineering. The platform integrates with major data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks), analytics platforms (Segment, Amplitude, Rudderstack, Posthog), and streaming services (Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub).
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Products and services
- Shaped Cloud Fully-managed AI ranking platform for real-time personalization, search, recommendations, and agent retrieval. Handles embeddings, models, and data freshness with sub-50ms latency, 30+ native data connectors, SOC 2 Type II / GDPR / HIPAA / CCPA compliance, and a 99.95% uptime SLA. Sold to enterprises and mid-market companies via self-serve ($100 free credits) and white-glove enterprise plans.
- BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) Self-hosted deployment option allowing enterprises to run Shaped within their own cloud infrastructure (coming soon). Targets regulated and large enterprises that require data residency and infrastructure control.
- Signal Engine Declarative feature engineering system for GBDT ranking models with 25+ signal primitives and point-in-time correctness guarantees. Powers ranking models, search relevance, and agent context by eliminating training-serving skew and reducing iteration time.
Quantifiable outcome
- 2.5x engagement improvement (NY Mag)
- +13 more outcomes
Companies that use Shaped
Customer profileNamed customers18 records
Segments5 records
Ideal customer profiles4 records
Shaped technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration18 records
AI capability10 records
Feature8 records
Shaped partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
18 partnerships are on record, tiered core.
- MuxcoreIntegration partnership enabling real-time video recommendation personalization. Combining Mux video platform with Shaped via AWS Kinesis enables sophisticated video recommendations and search rankings based on viewer engagement data.
- SnowflakecoreNative data warehouse connector. Ingest raw event logs directly from Snowflake. No ETL required. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
- BigQuerycoreNative data warehouse connector. Connect BigQuery for batch and streaming data integration. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
- Amazon RedshiftcoreNative data warehouse connector. Connect Redshift for unified data schemas. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
- DatabrickscoreNative data platform connector. Connect Databricks for unified data views and transforms. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
- SegmentcoreNative analytics connector. Stream customer interaction data from Segment. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
- AmplitudecoreNative analytics connector. Connect Amplitude for behavioral data integration. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
- KafkacoreNative streaming connector. Real-time event stream ingestion via Kafka. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
- AWS KinesiscoreNative streaming connector. Real-time data streaming via AWS Kinesis. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
- Google Cloud Pub/SubcoreNative streaming connector. Real-time event streaming via Pub/Sub. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
- PostgreSQLcoreNative catalog storage connector. Connect PostgreSQL databases. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
- MongoDBcoreNative catalog storage connector. Connect MongoDB document databases. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
- ShopifycoreNative e-commerce connector. Connect Shopify store data including products, orders, and customer data. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
- SingleStorecoreNative database connector. Connect SingleStore for unified data processing. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
- ClickHousecoreNative analytics database connector. Connect ClickHouse for analytical workloads. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
- RudderstackcoreNative customer data platform connector. Stream data from Rudderstack. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
- SnowplowcoreNative analytics connector. Connect Snowplow event tracking data. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
- PosthogcoreNative product analytics connector. Connect Posthog session and event data. Part of 30+ connector ecosystem.
Scale indicators21 records
Recent moves7 records
Expansion highlights6 records
Shaped competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- Algolia: Algolia provides search-as-a-service APIs for websites and applications with AI-powered personalization and recommendations. Shaped explicitly compares against Algolia in marketing collateral and overlaps directly on hybrid search and personalized discovery use cases across e-commerce and content platforms.
- Recombee: Recombee is a recommendation-as-a-service platform offering personalized content, product, and media recommendations via API. Shaped benchmarks directly against Recombee and competes head-to-head on multi-vertical personalization accuracy and latency.
- AWS Personalize: Amazon's managed recommendation service within AWS for personalization and targeted marketing. Shaped explicitly positions against AWS Personalize with documented 59% cost advantage, 360x faster data freshness, and superior benchmark Hit Rate (49.5% vs 45.7%).
- Constructor.io: Constructor.io provides AI-powered search and product discovery for e-commerce and enterprise retailers, with personalized results and semantic ranking. Direct competitor for Shaped's e-commerce personalization use cases including product recommendations and cart upsell.
- Coveo: Coveo is an enterprise AI search and recommendations platform focused on commerce, service, and workplace. Comparable in customer segment (enterprise), product breadth (search + recommendations + generative AI), and integration with Salesforce/SAP/Shopify ecosystems.
- Bloomreach: Bloomreach offers e-commerce personalization including search, merchandising, and content. Direct overlap with Shaped on e-commerce product recommendations, personalized email, and content discovery for digital retailers and D2C brands.
- Pinecone: Pinecone is a managed vector database used as a building block in RAG and similarity-search stacks. Shaped explicitly contrasts itself against the 'Pinecone + Cohere + Redis + pipelines' stack, positioning its unified retrieval + ranking + learning engine as a replacement.
- Weaviate: Weaviate is an open-source vector database with hybrid search and generative search capabilities. Comparable to Shaped on vector retrieval and RAG workloads, with Weaviate serving as an alternative component in agent stacks Shaped aims to consolidate.
- Typesense: Typesense is an open-source, typo-tolerant search engine that powers on-site search and discovery experiences. Direct overlap with Shaped's hybrid search and retrieval use cases for marketplaces, media, and e-commerce customers.
Broad incumbents
- Elastic: Elastic is a broad search and analytics platform with vector search, hybrid retrieval, and ES|QL capabilities used across enterprise. Overlaps with Shaped on hybrid search and RAG workloads but serves a much wider portfolio of use cases including observability and security.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat5 records
Key risks6 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
Shaped social profiles
Digital presenceShaped compliance and trust
Trust signalCompliance4 records
Shaped financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Shaped leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles1 record
Shaped funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds2 records
Investors9 records
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Shaped M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Shaped
What does Shaped do?
Shaped builds an AI-native, real-time context engine delivered as a cloud SaaS platform that unifies retrieval, ranking, and continuous learning in a single query. The platform powers personalized feeds, hybrid search, agent memory/RAG retrieval, and product recommendations for e-commerce, marketplaces, media, social, and B2B SaaS companies, with sub-50ms latency, 30+ native data connectors, and built-in explainability.
Is Shaped a public or private company?
Shaped is a private company. It is classified as venture growth investor backed and is currently operating.
When was Shaped founded?
Shaped was founded in 2022. It employs 11 to 50 people.
Where is Shaped based?
Shaped is headquartered in New York, United States, in the North America region.
How does Shaped make money?
Two revenue lines are on record. Platform SaaS Subscription is the primary driver. The others are usage-based Query Pricing.
Who are Shaped's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are Algolia, Recombee, AWS Personalize, Constructor.io, Coveo, Bloomreach, Pinecone, Weaviate and Typesense. Elastic is listed as a broad incumbent.
Does Shaped have an API?
Yes. Shaped offers a SQL-based API (ShapedQL) for querying the relevance engine. The API supports ranking, search, and recommendation queries with features including semantic search, keyword search, hybrid retrieval, behavioral scoring, diversity reordering, session context, and custom embeddings. Available via Python SDK, TypeScript SDK, and Model Context Protocol (MCP). Developer documentation is at docs.shaped.ai.
What industry is Shaped in?
Shaped's product category is AI Personalization and Recommendation Platform. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HDAAADAB, Search, Retrieval & Semantic Ranking (BM25/vector, hybrid), with a secondary code of HDAAACAE, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Vector Databases & Knowledge Grounding. Its NAICS code is 5132 and its SIC code is 7372.