Thrive Capital Bets $100 Million on Shopify’s AI Future

Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital has invested about $100 million in Shopify, betting that artificial intelligence could enhance commerce, Bloomberg reported Thursday (May 14), citing unnamed sources.

Neither Shopify nor Thrive Capital immediately replied to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

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 that Thrive X would designate $1 billion for early-stage investments and $9 billion for growth-stage investments.

“We take a long view grounded in the belief that category-defining companies tend to create structural compounding advantages over long arcs,” the firm said. “This fund reflects the continuity of our approach and the ways our work has deepened alongside the founders we support.”

Shopify reported May 5 that during the first quarter, AI-driven traffic 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.

Together, those numbers drove Shopify’s strongest quarterly revenue growth rate in over four years.

Shopify President Harley Finkelstein attributed the success of the company’s agentic strategy to its catalog, in which Shopify has structured more than 1 billion products with clean attributes, real-time pricing and accurate inventory.

“In a world where real-time information is now table stakes, the edge is the insight behind it,” Finkelstein said during an earnings call. “And that requires a depth, not just access, but experience.”

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

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

“We’re probably more excited about this particular new era of commerce than we ever have been because we think it’s just going to create so much opportunity, not just for the large merchants, but for the long tail of merchants,” Finkelstein said.