Shapes Puts AI Characters in Group Chats, Because Chatting Alone With Bots Is Weird

I’ve been watching the AI companion space for a while now, and most of it feels like a digital version of talking to yourself in a mirror. You chat with a bot, it validates you, you get lonely again. Rinse, repeat. Shapes is trying something different: dropping AI characters into group chats where real humans are already talking.

The app just came out of stealth with $8 million in seed funding from Lightspeed, AI Capital Partners, AI Grant, and some angels. It’s been running since 2022 and already has over 400,000 monthly active users. The founders, Anushk Mittal and Noorie Dhingra, are framing this as a fix for what they call “AI Psychosis” — the documented phenomenon where prolonged one-on-one chatbot interactions can make people paranoid or delusional. Instead of isolating users with a private AI companion, Shapes puts the AI in a shared space where other humans can see what’s happening.

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

I buy that reasoning more than I expected. The social dynamics of a group chat are fundamentally different from a private DM. You have witnesses. There’s accountability. If the AI says something unhinged, someone else in the chat can call it out. That’s a healthier setup than the black box of a private companion app.

In Shapes, AI characters — called “Shapes” — are treated like any other user. They can send messages, react, and initiate conversations without being summoned. They’re clearly labeled as AI for transparency, but otherwise they have the same permissions as human participants. Users can create their own Shapes and set their personalities. The company says people have already created 3 million of these things, many of them rooted in fandom — think deep-dive discussions about niche anime or obscure music genres.

When you sign up, the app asks for your interests and recommends group chats accordingly. It’s essentially Discord but with bots that have distinct personalities rather than just utility functions. The founders argue that one reason group chats die is that nobody wants to be the first to speak. Shapes solves that by having AI agents kick things off or keep conversations moving. And you never have to worry about being left on read — the AI will always respond.

I should note that ChatGPT already lets you create group chats with both humans and AI, but those are more for planning and brainstorming. Shapes is explicitly social. It’s about hanging out, not getting work done. The company acknowledges this isn’t for everyone. “Shapes is about human conversations,” Mittal said. “It’s more of a next-gen chat app than an AI app. The demographic is people who are obsessively online, who spend a lot of time online connecting and sharing.”

Growth has been entirely word of mouth, with a sixfold increase in users since the start of 2026. Thousands of users apparently spend two to four hours a day in the app. That’s a lot of time, but I’ve seen people sink similar hours into Discord servers, so it’s not unprecedented.

The $8 million will go toward development and user acquisition. I’m curious to see whether Shapes can scale beyond the obsessively online crowd or if it’ll remain a niche for people who really, really want to chat about their favorite fictional universe with a bot that shares their enthusiasm. Either way, it’s a more thoughtful approach to AI companionship than most of what’s out there.