By Shubhangi Chowdhury
Index Ventures-backed startup Crossing Minds, announced on Thursday that its joining OpenAI. “After eight years of building Crossing Minds, our team is joining OpenAI,” as per the post shared by the company. The venture provides AI recommendation systems to e-commerce businesses.
“Joining OpenAI allows us to bring our work — and our values — into a mission we deeply respect: to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. We’re thrilled to bring our experience and energy to a team that’s setting the direction for the future of AI. We’re excited to learn, to contribute, and to help shape what’s next,” the startup’s co-founders wrote in a post on its website.
Alexandre Robicquet, one of the co-founders, has already updated his LinkedIn bio to reflect this transition.
READ: OpenAI to integrate Shopify with ChatGPT for shopping (April 22, 2025)
After news broke that the team behind Crossing Minds is joining OpenAI, the company quietly updated its website with a simple message: “Crossing Minds is no longer accepting new clients.”
Once known for powering personalization for big names like Intuit, Anthropic, Udacity, and Chanel, the company has now hit pause on new business as it transitions into its next chapter under the OpenAI umbrella.
Founded by Dr. Sebastian Thrun, Dr. Emile Contal, and Alexandre Robicquet, Crossing Minds primarily focuses on e-commerce platforms, helping them sharpen personalization and recommendation tools. Its core approach is analyzing real-time customer behavior on-site to understand shopping patterns without relying on personal data or breaching privacy, as claimed by the company.
The venture is also backed by others such as Shopify, Plug and Play, and Radical Ventures, and had raised more than $13.5 million across multiple rounds, as per Crunchbase.
Tech giants are now going all in on AI to reshape the shopping experience. They are making it faster, more personalized, and sometimes a little too persuasive. Amazon leads the pack, using machine learning to recommend products based on browsing behavior, purchase history, and even voice interactions through Alexa.
READ: OpenAI eyes $500 million acquisition of Sam Altman and Jony Ive’s new AI hardware startup
Google recently introduced AI-powered shopping features in Search, like virtual try-ons and generative summaries of product reviews. Even Meta is testing AI that learns your taste through ad interactions and Instagram behavior, aiming to turn casual scrolling into purchases.
These algorithmic systems don’t just respond to people’s shopping needs. Rather they learn to shape what people think they need. AI curates a reality based on clicks, narrowing down to what the system thinks the best. Leading to filtered exposure in the shopping sector.
