Crossing Minds
Crossing Minds was an AI recommendation and RAG platform for e-commerce personalization.
Acquired Crossing Minds
Acquired · June 2025
Crossing Minds was an AI recommendation startup serving e-commerce firms, founded in 2016 by a team including Sebastian Thrun, Emile Contal, and Alexandre Robicquet. It built recommendation embeddings and a RAG system called RAGSys. OpenAI hired the team on June 27, 2025, and the company stopped taking new clients. Robicquet joined OpenAI in a research role.
Acquired by OpenAI.
Last known pricing: Enterprise quotes on request
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Overview
What happened to Crossing Minds
Crossing Minds built AI recommendation systems for e-commerce companies, generating personalized product suggestions without relying on third-party tracking. Founded in 2016 by a team that included AI researcher Sebastian Thrun, alongside Emile Contal and Alexandre Robicquet, it raised more than $13 million from investors including Shopify and Index Ventures.
The company offered tools for generating embeddings tuned to shopping behavior and a retrieval system called RAGSys for grounding AI applications.
Key Features
- Recommendation embeddings tuned for shopping behavior
- RAGSys for retrieval-augmented generation
- Cold-start and privacy-first personalization
- APIs for integrating recommendations into storefronts
- Real-time relevance ranking
What happened to Crossing Minds
OpenAI hired the Crossing Minds team on June 27, 2025, in an acqui-hire, and the startup stopped taking on new clients. Co-founder Alexandre Robicquet joined OpenAI in a research role focused on AI agents and post-training.
FAQ
Is Crossing Minds still available? No. The team joined OpenAI on June 27, 2025 and the company stopped taking new clients.
Who acquired Crossing Minds? OpenAI, in an acqui-hire announced on June 27, 2025.
Who founded Crossing Minds? A team including Sebastian Thrun, Emile Contal, and Alexandre Robicquet, in 2016.
tl;dr
Crossing Minds was an AI recommendation and RAG platform for e-commerce. OpenAI hired its team in June 2025 and the company stopped taking new clients.