Shapes Puts AI Characters in Your Group Chats, and It’s Actually Kind of Fun

I’ve seen a lot of attempts to make AI “social” over the years, and most of them feel forced or gimmicky. But Shapes, an app that just came out of stealth with $8 million in seed funding, is doing something that actually makes sense to me: dropping AI characters directly into group chats alongside real people.

Think of it like Discord, but some of the participants aren’t human. They’re called “Shapes” — AI agents with their own personalities, clearly labeled so you know they’re not real, but otherwise free to chat, react, and initiate conversations just like anyone else in the room.

Founded in 2022 by Anushk Mittal and Noorie Dhingra, the app already has over 400,000 monthly active users. That’s not huge, but it’s respectable for a stealth-mode social app. And the growth trajectory is interesting — they claim a sixfold increase in users since the start of 2026, driven almost entirely by word of mouth.

What caught my attention is the founders’ take on what they call “AI Psychosis.” That’s their term for the delusions and paranoia that can develop when people spend too much time in isolated, one-on-one conversations with AI companions. It’s a real concern, and I’ve written before about how these private AI relationships can get weird fast. Shapes’ solution isn’t to remove AI, but to make it communal. Instead of talking to an AI in a dark room by yourself, you’re chatting with one while your friends are also in the conversation.

“Our lives run on group chats,” Mittal told TechCrunch. “That’s where we spend all of our time. It’s just natural to bring in AI into those same conversations.”

I buy that. Group chats are where most of my social life happens these days, and the idea of having an AI that can jump in with context, keep a conversation going, or just react to something is appealing — especially if you’ve ever been in a group chat that dies because nobody wants to be the first to speak.

Shapes solves that problem neatly. The AI agents have free will — they don’t need to be summoned or tagged. They can decide when to message, and they’ll always respond to you. That’s a big deal for anyone who’s ever sent a message into a silent group chat and waited.

Users have already created over 3 million custom Shapes, many of them rooted in fandom. The app asks you about your interests when you sign up and recommends group chats accordingly. It’s clearly targeting people who are “obsessively online,” as Mittal put it — people who spend hours diving into subcultures and want AI that can keep up.

Now, is this for everyone? No. If you’re the type who finds group chats exhausting already, adding AI into the mix probably sounds like a nightmare. And the app leans heavily into social, community-style interactions, not the planning or brainstorming you’d do in a ChatGPT group chat. It’s a different beast.

But I can see the appeal for the right audience. The funding round, led by Lightspeed with participation from AI Capital Partners and AI Grant, suggests investors see it too. Shapes plans to use the money to accelerate development and user acquisition.

I’m curious to see where this goes. The AI companion space has been dominated by one-on-one apps that feel more like therapy sessions than social tools. Shapes is betting that the future of AI interaction is group-oriented, messy, and human. I hope they’re right.