Thrive Capital bets $100M on Shopify's AI commerce strategy as stock trades 46% below peak

Thrive Capital invests $100M in Shopify in rare public-market bet on AI commerce

Joshua Kushner's Thrive Capital has taken a roughly $100 million stake in Shopify, according to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter. The investment is notable less for its size, $100 million is a rounding error in a firm that raised more than $10 billion for its latest fund, than for what it signals about where the most successful venture investors now see value. Thrive, best known for backing OpenAI, SpaceX, and Stripe when they were private, is buying a public company whose stock has fallen 40% this year. The firm told its stakeholders that the Shopify position is a bet on how artificial intelligence could drive gains in commerce. That framing connects the investment to a broader thesis Thrive has pursued across its portfolio: that AI will restructure the economics of every industry it touches, from defence to drug discovery to, now, the software that powers online retail. Thrive is part of a small but growing cohort of venture firms that have started investing in public equities alongside their traditional startup portfolios. The firm is registered as an investment adviser, a designation that allows it to use the same funds for public and private positions. So are Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, two of the other firms that have made similar moves. The precedent within Thrive's own portfolio is instructive. In March 2022, the firm bought a significant position in Carvana, the online car marketplace, at a time when the company was in financial distress. Thrive realised a $522 million profit on the trade, according to Bloomberg. The Carvana bet was not venture investing in any traditional sense. It was a contrarian public-market play, and it worked. The Shopify investment follows a similar logic. The company's first-quarter revenue grew 34.3% year on year to $3.17 billion, but its second-quarter guidance implied a deceleration to roughly 27.5% growth, and operating-profit forecasts came in below expectations. The stock slumped. Shares are now trading nearly 46% below their 52-week high. But Thrive appears to view the sell-off as an entry point rather than a warning. Other venture firms are making comparable public bets. Accel, which typically backs early-stage software companies, has invested in Nebius Group, the cloud-computing provider. Sequoia Capital bought additional shares in Figma this year, building on a position it first established when it backed the design tool as a startup in 2019. Thrive itself holds public positions in Figma, StubHub, and Oscar Health, the health-insurance company that Kushner co-founded. The pattern reflects a structural shift. Startups are taking longer to go public. The median time from founding to IPO has stretched well beyond a decade for many venture-backed companies. In the interim, the most valuable private companies, OpenAI at $852 billion, Anthropic approaching $900 billion, are commanding valuations that leave less room for upside than a publicly traded company like Shopify, whose stock has been punished for delivering growth that merely slowed. In a market where AI valuations invite comparisons to the dot-com era, the beaten-down public company may offer better risk-adjusted returns than the private unicorn. Shopify has spent the past year trying to move upmarket. The company built its business on small and medium-sized merchants, the independent shops and direct-to-consumer brands that needed an alternative to Amazon, but has increasingly courted larger retailers, betting that the order volume generated by bigger clients will accelerate growth beyond what its existing base can deliver. The AI angle is central to that strategy. Shopify launched what it calls "agentic commerce" earlier this year, a sales channel that allows merchants to surface products directly inside AI chat platforms such as ChatGPT. AI-driven orders on the platform grew 15 times year on year in 2025, according to the company. The bet is that as consumers begin interacting with AI assistants rather than search engines, the infrastructure that connects merchants to those assistants will become as important as the storefront itself. That is the thesis Thrive is underwriting. Not that Shopify's current growth rate justifies a higher multiple, but that AI will transform the economics of commerce in ways the market is not yet pricing in. It is, in essence, the same bet Thrive made on OpenAI before most investors understood what large language models could do, applied to a company that is already public, already profitable, and already down 40%. Thrive's $10 billion fund, raised in February, is its largest. The firm has continued to lead private rounds, including megadeals in defence tech and Alphabet's Isomorphic Labs, but the Shopify position suggests that Kushner sees the public market as an increasingly important part of the opportunity set. When private valuations are measured in hundreds of billions, and public stocks in the same sectors have been discounted by 40%, the arithmetic can favour the listed company. Whether Thrive is right about Shopify depends on whether AI commerce becomes as transformative as the firm believes. The risk is that Shopify's deceleration is not a buying opportunity but the beginning of a structural slowdown as competition from Amazon, Temu, and an expanding ecosystem of AI-native commerce platforms intensifies. But Thrive has been willing to take concentrated, contrarian positions before, in Carvana, in OpenAI before it was fashionable, in defence before it was lucrative, and the returns have justified the approach. The Shopify bet is the latest test of whether the pattern holds.

Thrive Capital Bets $100 Million on Shopify's AI Future | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. 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.