Meet Shapes, the app bringing humans and AI into the same group chats

10:19 PM IST · April 29, 2026

Shapes, an app where humans and AI characters chat together in shared group conversations, is emerging from stealth with $8 million in seed funding. Think Discord, but with AI characters alongside humans. Founded in 2022, Shapes has more than 400,000 monthly active users. The app’s founders, Anushk Mittal and Noorie Dhingra, believe that Shapes can address issues around “AI Psychosis,” which refers to cases where prolonged interactions with AI chatbots or AI companions can cause individuals to develop delusions or paranoia. Instead of isolating people with one-on-one interactions with AI, Shapes allows people to connect with AI within their everyday interactions with real people. “Today, all of our conversations with AI are very private and one-on-one, but that’s not really how humans collaborate and communicate with each other,” Shapes CEO Mittal told TechCrunch in an interview. “Our lives run on group chats. 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 where AI has all of the context and is readily available to help you.” In the app, AI characters, called “Shapes,” are viewed as any other user and can interact in all the same ways humans can. They’re clearly labeled as “Shapes” for transparency, but they aren’t restricted. Users can create their own Shapes and set their personalities. The company says users have already created three million Shapes to add into group chats. Many Shapes are rooted in fandom, as the app serves as a way for fans to deep-dive on subculture and meet other fans. When users sign up for the app, they’re asked to choose their interests so the app can recommend a selection of group chats they might be interested in joining. While some may question the need for adding AI into group chats, Mittal and Dhingra believe one of the main reasons group chats die is that some participants don’t want to be the first person to send a message. Shapes solves this, as AI agents can initiate conversations and play a key role in keeping them going. Additionally, users don’t have to worry about not getting a response to their messages because Shapes will always acknowledge and respond to them. Unlike AI companions on other apps that need to be summoned, Shapes have free will and can decide when to message. It’s worth noting that although the popular chatbot ChatGPT already allows AI and humans to converse in group chats, those conversations operate differently from Shapes. For example, when you create a group chat in ChatGPT, it’s mostly for planning or brainstorming. On Shapes, however, it’s all about social, community-style interactions with AI characters that have various personalities. The startup is aware that not everyone will want to bring AI into their group conversations, which is why the app is designed for a specific type of online user. “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. Those are the users who come in and they get an opportunity to obsess about their interests, and the AI acts as a facilitator in those conversations.” Shapes’ growth has been driven by word of mouth, Mittal says, with the app seeing a sixfold increase in users since the start of the year. The company also says that thousands of users spend two to four hours in the app each day. As for the new funding, the company plans to use it to accelerate development and user acquisition. The round was led by Lightspeed, with participation from AI Capital Partners, AI Grant, and angel investors.

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Laid-off Oracle workers tried to negotiate better severance. Oracle said no.

As was widely reported, Oracleaxed an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 peoplevia email on March 31. One of the employees cut that day told TechCrunch about the experience: “I had, like, this weird feeling in my stomach. I went to go sign into the VPN, and the VPN was like, ‘this user doesn’t exist anymore.’ Then I called my friend, and I was like, ‘Hey, can you see me in Slack?’ And she said, ‘No, your account’s been deactivated.’” The person soon received an email stating their role was terminated immediately. The severance offer arrived a few days later. But Oracle’s terms would quickly become a point of contention — and some laid-off employees would push back. Oracle offered fairly standard Corporate America terms to laid off employees. In exchange for signing a release waiving their right to sue, employees received four weeks of pay for the first year, plus one additional week per year of service, capped at 26 weeks. The company was also paying for one month of COBRA insurance. The catch: Although stock compensation often makes up a good chunk of a tech worker’s pay, particularly at Oracle, the company did not accelerate soon-to-vest RSUs. Any shares that hadn’t vested by the termination date were forfeited. That held true even for stock granted as retention incentives or in place of salary increases tied to promotions. One long-tenured employee lost $1 million in stock that was just four months from vesting; RSUs made up about 70% of his compensation,Time reported. Some employees also discovered that if they were classified as remote workers by the company, and didn’t work in a state with stronger worker provisions like California or New York, the company said they didn’t qualify for WARN Act protections. TheWARN Act is a lawthat requires companies conducting mass layoffs to give employees two months notice prior to letting them go. It’s triggered when 50 or more people are impacted at one location. By classifying employees as remote workers, the minimum location requirements can be sidestepped. Some people were unaware they were classified as remote workers, because they were near an office and worked on a hybrid schedule. Even if they were covered by the WARN Act, this did not necessarily extend severance, the former Oracle employee said. That’s because Oracle included the two-months’ WARN notice pay in its existing calculation of four-weeks, plus one week per year. For a short time, a group of employees tried to negotiate en masse with Oracle, according to a letter seen by TechCrunch. At least90 people signed a public petitionurging the database and cloud computing giant to match the terms of other big tech companies conducting mass layoffs in the name of AI. For instance, Meta’s severance package, according to an email published by Business Insider, started at 16 weeks of base pay, plus two weeks for every year of employment and covered COBRA for 18 months. Microsoft, which extended voluntary retirement offers to long-serving employees, provided accelerated stock vesting, a minimum of eight weeks’ pay, and an additional one to two weeks for every six months of service, depending on rank, theSeattle Times reported. And Cloudflare, which just cut 20% of its employees,offered lump sum severancethat was the equivalent of base pay through the end of 2026, plus healthcare coverage through the end of the year, and accelerated vesting of stock through August 15. So if an employee was close to obtaining another tranche, they will get it. Oracle declined to negotiate, according to an email seen by TechCrunch. It was a take-it-or-leave scenario, the employee said. When asked about its severance terms, classifying employees as remote, and the failed attempt by employees to negotiate more, Oracle declined to comment. Such a reaction from the company isn’t a surprise, not even to those who hoped to negotiate. But it does underscore that for all the theoretical high pay (often via stocks) and perks that tech workers enjoy when it’s an employees’ market, they have very few protections in place when it isn’t.

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Cloudflare says AI made 1,100 jobs obsolete, even as revenue hit a record high

Cloudflare on Thursday joined a growing list of tech companies — including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon — that have reported increased revenue alongside massive layoffs, attributing both trends to their use of AI. Cloudflare, which provides internet security and performance services to millions of websites worldwide, announced it was cutting its workforce by approximately 20%, which equates to 1,100 people, it said as part of its first quarter 2026 earnings report on Thursday. “We’ve never done something like this in Cloudflare’s history,” co-founder and CEO Matthew PrincesaidThursday on the quarterly conference call, marking the first mass layoff in the company’s 16-year history. The company is cutting people from all teams and geographies except for salespeople who carry revenue quotas, CFO Thomas Seifert detailed on the call. The news of the workforce cuts came as the companyreportedquarterly revenues of $639.8 million, a 34% year-over-year increase and the highest single quarter in the company’s history. However, this was coupled with a loss of $62.0 million compared with losing $53.2 million in the year-ago quarter. That widening loss, even as revenue surged, highlights a familiar paradox in Cloudflare’s story: the company is growing fast but has yet to turn a consistent profit. But the loss was a smaller percentage of revenue, and the quarter was coupled with a lot of other positive indicators. For instance, Cloudflare reported that it had over $2.5 billion in “remaining performance obligations,” a year-over-year growth of 34%. RPO is the favorite metric these days to indicate revenue under contract but not yet delivered. Hence, Prince insisted, the 20% cuts were not to reduce expenses but were strictly because of its use of AI. “Today’s actions are not a cost-cutting exercise or an assessment of individuals’ performance; they are about Cloudflare defining how a world-class, high-growth company operates and creates value in the agentic AI era,” Prince and Cloudflare co-founder and president, Michelle Zatlyn,wrotein a related blog post about the layoffs. Prince acknowledged on the call that even though Cloudflare has been selling AI-powered products, it was at first cautious about adopting AI itself. “Internally, the tipping point was last November. At that point, across our teams, we began to see massive productivity gains, team members that were two, 10, even 100 times more productive than they had been before. It was like going from a manual to an electric screwdriver,” he described. “Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone,” he added. Prince highlighted the internal use of AI coding, saying that virtually the entire R&D team is now using the company’s own Workers platform — a tool that lets developers build and run software directly on Cloudflare’s global network — including its vibe coding feature. He also noted that 100% of the code produced this way and deployed for use in Cloudflare’s products is “now reviewed by autonomous AI agents.” But it’s not just developers who are using AI internally, he said. “Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done.” As a result, these highly productive, AI-powered employees require fewer support staff, he argued. “A lot of the support people that provide support behind them, those roles aren’t going to be the roles that, you know, drive companies going forward,” Prince said. Interestingly, Prince says that Cloudflare “will continue to hire people, and we’ll continue to invest in them because the people that are embracing these tools are just so much more productive than we’d ever seen before. I would guess that in 2027 we’ll have more employees than we did at any point in 2026.” Cloudflare said it ended its first quarter before layoffs with a headcount of about 5,500. The pattern Prince described — deploying AI gains as justification for workforce reductions even during a period of strong revenue growth — is fast becoming a familiar script across the tech industry. Whether it reflects true structural transformation or acts as convenient cover for cost discipline is a question that investors and employees will be wrestling with for some time to come. When asked by an analyst on the call why the company needed to cut so deeply after such a good quarter, Prince said, “Just because you’re fit doesn’t mean you can’t get fitter.”

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Intel’s comeback story is even wilder than it seems

Bloomberg has adeep divethis week into how Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan is trying to rescue one of Silicon Valley’s most storied, and stumbling, chipmakers. It’s worth a read, but it actually undersells the most jaw-dropping part of the story: Intel’s stock has risen a stunning 490% over the past year, a bet by Wall Street that may be running well ahead of the company’s actual turnaround. Tan, who took over inMarch of last year, has spent much of his first year schmoozing rather than restructuring — locking in asweetheart dealwith the U.S. government (now Intel’s third-largest shareholder), cozying up to Elon Musk on afactory partnership, and reportedly landing preliminary manufacturing agreements with both Apple and Tesla. The fundamentals are still messy. Intel’s chip yields lag well behind industry leader TSMC, and employees tell Bloomberg that Tan has been light on specifics internally, with some teams adjusting missed deadlines rather than recovering from them. But investors are betting big on the bigger picture. Whether the execution follows is the multi-billion-dollar question.

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Last 24 hours to get 50% off a second pass to TechCrunch Disrupt 2026

Today is the last day. At 11:59 p.m. PT, the 50% off second pass offer forTechCrunch Disrupt 2026ends. After that, prices go up, and the option to bring a partner, co-founder, or colleague with you at half the cost disappears. Register now to lock in your savings.Save up to $410 on your pass and get 50% on a second pass. Disruptisn’t a single-track experience. It’s multiple conversations happening at once. Sessions overlap. Introductions lead to something else an hour later. Patterns only become clear after you’ve seen the same idea from different angles. When you go alone, you see only part of it. When you bring someone, you see more, and more importantly, you understand more. You compare notes in real time, challenge assumptions, and make decisions while the context is still fresh.Get a discounted second pass now. You and your plus-one will have access to: That’s not a small difference. It’s the difference between leaving with ideas and leaving with direction for your next steps. And after tonight, that second perspective costs more. This is your last day to save 50% on a second pass.Choose your tickets. From October 13–15 in San Francisco atDisrupt,the startup world will be in the same place at the same time, turning conversations into capital, ideas into companies, and connections into trajectories. They’ll be trading signals, testing assumptions, and deciding what matters based on what they’re seeing in real time. When you act now to secure your pass —and a second at 50% off— you’ll be in the room while those decisions (and discussions) are taking shape. Across 250+ sessions, you’ll explore real-world playbooks (not theory), covering: Those conversations don’t pause when the event ends. They carry forward into follow-ups, deals, partnerships, and decisions made in the weeks that follow. If you’re not there, you’re not just missing the event. You’re reacting later to conclusions other people reached sooner.Buy a pass to Disrupt today and get a second one for 50%off to be a part of the conversations. Knowing you have a strong idea isn’t enough. You need clarity on where to take it, who to partner with, and how to fund it. Without that clarity, decisions stall. Roadmaps stretch. Opportunities sit just long enough to lose momentum. Disruptcompresses that uncertainty. You see how decisions get made — onstage, in roundtables, and in conversations that build on each other over three days. Better outcomes come from: Miss that window, and you’re back to piecing together secondhand insight, slower feedback loops, and decisions made without the same level of context. This is your final day to get a second pass for 50% off.Register now before prices increase at 11:59 p.m. ET tonight. After tonight, you can still attendDisrupt. But you’re more likely to go alone — and that changes the experience. It means choosing between sessions instead of covering more ground. Processing everything yourself instead of testing it in real time. Following up later instead of leaving with shared clarity. That’s the real cost. Not just paying more, but also getting less out of being there.Lock in your 50% savings on a second ticketto show up more intentionally. Only hours remain to buy a pass toDisruptand get a second for 50% off. The offer ends tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT. Right now, you can still: After today, that advantage is gone. Buy one pass to Disrupt andget 50% off the second of the same ticket type. Decide who you’re bringing — and secure your passes before midnight tonight. Because missing this isn’t just about price. It’s about showing up with less context, less coverage, and less clarity than the people who didn’t wait.

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