{"id":449895,"date":"2026-05-15T08:21:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T08:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/449895\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T08:21:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T08:21:14","slug":"thrive-capital-bets-100-million-on-shopifys-ai-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/449895\/","title":{"rendered":"Thrive Capital Bets $100 Million on Shopify\u2019s AI Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joshua Kushner<\/a>\u2019s Thrive Capital<\/a> has invested about $100 million in Shopify<\/a>, betting that artificial intelligence could enhance commerce, Bloomberg reported<\/a> Thursday (May 14), citing unnamed sources.<\/p>\n

Neither Shopify nor Thrive Capital immediately replied to PYMNTS\u2019 request for comment.<\/p>\n

Thrive Capital announced in February that it raised more than $10 billion for a fund called Thrive X. The company said in a press release<\/a> that Thrive X would designate $1 billion for early-stage investments and $9 billion for growth-stage investments.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe take a long view grounded in the belief that category-defining companies tend to create structural compounding advantages over long arcs,\u201d the firm said. \u201cThis fund reflects the continuity of our approach and the ways our work has deepened alongside the founders we support.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shopify reported May 5 that during the first quarter, AI-driven traffic<\/a> to Shopify stores grew eight times year over year, orders from AI-powered searches grew nearly 13 times, and new buyer orders from AI searches arrived at nearly twice the rate of traditional organic search.<\/p>\n

Together, those numbers drove Shopify\u2019s strongest quarterly revenue growth rate in over four years.<\/p>\n

Advertisement: Scroll to Continue<\/p>\n

Shopify President Harley Finkelstein<\/a> attributed the success of the company\u2019s agentic strategy to its catalog, in which Shopify has structured more than 1 billion products with clean attributes, real-time pricing and accurate inventory.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a world where real-time information is now table stakes, the edge is the insight behind it,\u201d Finkelstein said during an earnings call. \u201cAnd that requires a depth, not just access, but experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

In March, Shopify launched a free mobile app called Tinker that is designed for merchants and consolidates more than 100 specialized AI tools<\/a> into a single guided environment for building brand assets, storefronts, social content and visual identity from plain-language inputs.<\/p>\n

During the same month, Finkelstein said Shopify is making a significant push toward agentic shopping<\/a> by using agentic applications as personal shoppers. He added that agents will bring context to shopping in a way traditional search engines cannot.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re probably more excited about this particular new era of commerce than we ever have been because we think it\u2019s just going to create so much opportunity, not just for the large merchants, but for the long tail of merchants,\u201d Finkelstein said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joshua Kushner\u2019s Thrive Capital has invested about $100 million in Shopify, betting that artificial intelligence could enhance commerce,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":449896,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[12484,220,218,219,61,60,43,179,78434,80,12672,181],"class_list":["post-449895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-agentic-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-pymnts-news","tag-shopify","tag-technology","tag-thrive-capital","tag-whats-hot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/449896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}