Shopify Ventures

Projects at Shopify don't always start on a roadmap. They start with people obsessively tinkering on real problems. Here are three open source Shopify projects that started this way: → pi-autoresearch (David Cortés Fulla, Staff Developer): an autonomous experiment loop for pi. Set your metric, let it run. It tests changes, measures results, reverts failures. Works on build times, bundle size, inference speed, ML training loss, anything measurable. https://lnkd.in/ehzGZZb6 → Tangle (Alexey Volkov, Staff Engineer and our Search team): an ML experimentation platform that's saved over a year of compute time internally. The coordination overhead that slows ML iteration — who ran what, can I reuse this, how do I reproduce that — is now gone. For smaller teams, it's the difference between being able to experiment or not. https://lnkd.in/enRtEMNg → qmd (Tobi Lutke, CEO): on-device search combining BM25 full-text search, vector semantic search, and LLM re-ranking. No API calls, no data leaving your machine, and MCP-compatible for AI coding workflows. https://lnkd.in/ee9hc7FG This is how we build and the kind of builders we partner with.

One year ago today, we came out of stealth and introduced Augie to the world. Today Augie supports teams that collectively move $50B of freight. Augie is handling 20MM annualized tasks saving the annual equivalent of 84,000 working days of drudgery for operators. That frees up a lot of time for strategic thinking, partnership building, and time with families. Augie is quoting, doing fraud monitoring, order entry, dispatch, appointment scheduling, capacity sourcing, track and trace, document collection, and customer support — real end-to-end work. The results: more loads per rep, higher margin per load, less deadhead, more revenue per mile — and in some cases, 160+ bps of net profit improvement. One customer is raising employee salaries because of the productivity gains. We've also grown from 5 to 150 people. But it's still Day 1 at Augment. Logistics moves the economy — and it's one of the most under-built industries in it. And just in freight 200,000 shippers, 900,000 trucking companies, and 20,000 brokerages, frontline operators are still fighting through a mess of emails, calls, and fragmented software just to get the work done. Augie is here to change that. And if you want to help build Augie — we're hiring.

Big milestone: Max Brodeur-Urbas, Max Brodeur-Urbas, and the entire Gumloop team closed their Series B led by Benchmark. This team doesn’t wait to ship. They’re launching new AI-enabled features, particularly in agent technology, and turning merchant feedback into real tools at Shopify. Expectations for AI products and workflows are rising, and Gumloop is pushing them higher.

How is generative media changing ecommerce? We reviewed our portfolio company fal’s State of Generative Media report to pinpoint the key shifts. Here’s what stood out and our take on what it means: → Quality and fidelity remain non-negotiable. Commerce visuals must faithfully represent products. Every detail counts. → Speed to market. Businesses can now go from product to rich media in minutes rather than months. → The greatest value comes from enhanced workflows, not one-shot generation. Seemingly mundane workflows like background removal, focal point detection, and segmentation are huge unlocks. → Cost curves are bending. High-quality visual content is becoming accessible to businesses of all sizes. → Rapid experimentation. Truly personalized content is now possible for buyers at scale.

Congratulations to Merrill Lutsky, Greg Foster, Tomas Reimers, and the entire Graphite team on joining forces with Cursor. This is a testament to the amazing team and product they’ve built. We look forward to continuing our work with Graphite and Cursor.

Modern payments need new rails. That’s why we're proud to back Tempo, a Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for stablecoin-native, real-world transactions. Tempo’s testnet launch is validated by design partners across fintech and enterprise, including Shopify, giving the team practical feedback as they scale infrastructure toward mainnet. With programmable compliance, dedicated payment lanes, and sub-second finality, we look forward to Tempo setting a new standard for global settlement.

The RenAIssance Edition has landed: over 150 product updates designed for the next era of commerce with AI tools at the core. Explore the full product drop: https://lnkd.in/eiDVHUkY Special shoutout to Crstl, featured in the Edition, for using their AI-driven infrastructure to automate data connections and streamline critical commerce workflows for Shopify merchants.

Generative media is reshaping digital and ecommerce experiences, and fal is the leading multimedia cloud powering this transformation. Congrats to Burkay Gur, Gorkem Yurtseven, Batuhan T. and the entire fal team on this milestone. They have been trusted partners to Shopify, and we are proud to continue to support them on this journey.