OpenAI Hires Entire Team From AI Startup Backed By Shopify And Radical Ventures 'To Ensure AGI Benefits All Of Humanity'

After raising more than $13.5 million and spending eight years building personalized AI shopping technology, the entire team behind startup Crossing Minds is now joining OpenAI, TechCrunch reports.

Crossing Minds announced the transition on its website, calling it a "new chapter" and thanking its investors, partners, and internal team. According to TechCrunch, Crossing Minds had built a reputation for helping clients like Chanel, Intuit (NASDAQ:INTU), Udacity, and Anthropic improve real-time personalization without compromising user privacy. Crossing Minds had previously been backed by Index Ventures, Shopify (NASDAQ:SHOP), Plug and Play, and Radical Ventures across multiple rounds of funding.

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The startup developed technology that could understand long-term customer preferences using on-site behavioral data, avoiding the need to collect personal information, TechCrunch says.

Company Shuts Down Client Work as Co-Founders Say Goodbye to Startup Life

The Crossing Minds team said their work began with the core belief that understanding intent was the foundation for building powerful AI assistants. They didn't want to simply predict a user's next move, but to learn their long-term preferences and what made each individual unique.

That principle guided the company through years of development, research, and product testing. The team said that their goal was to create systems that could work in real time with messy, complicated environments, not just clean lab data.

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Crossing Minds is no longer accepting new business, according to its notice. It is unclear whether the company will continue to operate independently following the team's transition to OpenAI. The co-founders said they were motivated by a belief in OpenAI's mission and felt aligned with the company's broader purpose. "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," they wrote.

They also credited their team with embodying values like integrity, empathy, and over-delivery, praising the group for their persistence through difficult engineering challenges.

Alexandre Robicquet, one of the co-founders, has already updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect his new role at OpenAI in research, post-training, and AI agents.

“After eight years of building Crossing Minds, today marks the start of a new chapter: our team is joining OpenAI,” Robicquet wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Personally, joining OpenAI's research team to focus on agents and information retrieval is a unique honor. These are precisely the problems I've always been passionate about: how systems learn, reason, and retrieve knowledge at scale, in real-time,” he added.

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Why OpenAI Might Want a Shopping Assistant Team Right Now

As Google and Perplexity roll out their own AI shopping tools, OpenAI has already been rolling out e-commerce features within ChatGPT, including AI-generated shopping suggestions, reviews, and images, TechCrunch says. OpenAI’s integration of Crossing Minds' team may strengthen its position in this competitive space.

Startups like Daydream have raised large rounds recently to build AI shopping assistants, signaling that recommendation technology is in high demand, according to TechCrunch.

Crossing Minds’ co-founders said that their work was rooted in understanding intent, not just predicting actions, and described the move to OpenAI as a natural continuation of their mission. They also said they were excited to learn and contribute alongside OpenAI's team, which they described as "setting the direction for the future of AI."

The co-founders have not disclosed what their immediate focus will be at OpenAI. As OpenAI expands its efforts in personalization, agents, and post-training systems, the Crossing Minds team will likely play a key role in shaping how those technologies are developed and deployed at scale.

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