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
Is Crossing Minds shut down?
Effectively, yes. Crossing Minds was acquired by OpenAI in Jun 2025 and the standalone product was sunset. Its record is preserved in the ToolDirectory.AI graveyard, our hand-reviewed registry of AI tools that shut down or were acquired.
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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.