Shapes emerges from stealth with $8M seed for AI-and-friends group chat app

SAN FRANCISCO — c, a San Francisco startup behind an app that lets users group chat with artificial intelligence agents alongside human friends, has emerged from stealth with an $8 million seed round. The company says its approach addresses what it calls “AI Psychosis,” a term it uses for isolating, one-on-one AI interactions.

The financing was led by Lightspeed, with participation from AI Capital Partners (Alpha Intelligence Capital’s US-based fund), AI Grant, and other Silicon Valley venture investors and angels. c said it will use the capital to accelerate product development and user acquisition.

Built by Gen Z developers and aimed at Gen Alpha and Gen Z users, the app treats AI agents—dubbed “Shapes”—as full participants in group chats. According to the company, Shapes had more than 400,000 monthly active users at the end of March 2026, a six-fold increase since the start of the year, and thousands of users spend two to four hours per day in the app.

Users have created more than 3 million AI agents to add to chats, the company said. “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.” Co-founder and CEO Anushk Mittal said the product is built on the idea that interactions with AI can share the same social footing as human exchanges.

“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,” Mittal said. He added that, on average, a user makes five or more friends after about 20 minutes in public chats.

Mittal and co-founder Noorie Dhingra started Shapes out of Georgia Tech with a stated mission to find more natural ways to interact with artificial general intelligence. Over the past five years, the team has built several consumer AI products that it says have powered more than 5 billion conversations between humans and AI.

The company argues that existing platforms often flag bots as spam or limit their activity, and that one-on-one AI companion apps can encourage heavy, isolated usage. By contrast, Shapes positions its app as a group experience without ads. Company research cited by Shapes suggests group chats often stall because users hesitate to send the first message.

The company says its AI agents can initiate conversations, keep discussions moving, choose whom to message and when, and even share memes—behavior it describes as more autonomous than traditional AI companions. Many agents are tied to fandoms and subcultures, giving fans places to meet and talk.

Most users are between ages 13 and 30, according to the company. Mittal said younger users want to feel connected and increasingly use AI to facilitate that. He added that many people in Gen Z and Gen Alpha do not maintain accounts on older social platforms, and that Shapes has become a primary way for some to interact with friends and meet new ones.

c did not disclose a timeline for new features but said the fresh funding will be directed to scaling the app and expanding its user base.