Shapes

Shapes is a social AI platform, legally incorporated as Circle Labs, Inc., that allows users to create, customize, and interact with AI-powered characters called "shapes" in group chats with other humans.¹ Founded in 2021 by Anushk Mittal and Noorie Dhingra, the San Francisco-based company raised $4.2 million in a seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in November 2022.³ By mid-2025 the platform had reached 30 million users and hosted more than 400,000 user-created shapes, exchanging billions of messages.⁶ Shapes is a portfolio company of Founders, Inc.¹

Founding and early history

Circle Labs originated at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where Anushk Mittal studied computer science.⁴ Mittal, originally from Ghaziabad, India, earned both a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in Computer Science from Georgia Tech, graduating in 2021.⁵ During his undergraduate years he published over 30 apps and extensions, conducted research on iOS application testing automation, and served as an officer in the university's iOS Club.⁵ Circle Labs debuted as booth 40 at the 2021 CREATE-X Demo Day, describing itself as a "tool to DIY create your own life-like AI entities (for businesses & consumers)."⁴

Noorie Dhingra, the company's co-founder, grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and attended Emory University, where she and Mittal met.⁶⁷ Dhingra had been working in startups since high school, running UX design and research for Fortune 500 companies, leading growth for a startup where she closed six-figure deals, and managing TikTok campaigns for brands including IHOP, Procter & Gamble, and Meta.⁶ She later enrolled at NYU but dropped out, and in January 2023 the two co-founders relocated to San Francisco together to build the company full-time.⁶

Funding

In November 2022, Circle Labs announced a $4.2 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.³ Lightspeed investors on the deal included Michael Mignano, Faraz Fatemi, and Semil Shah.² Additional participants in the round were Haystack, Scott Belsky (founder of Behance and Adobe's chief product officer), and AI Grant Fund.⁹ As of April 2026, this remained the company's only publicly disclosed funding round, with a total of $4.2 million raised.⁸

Product

Shapes are user-created AI agents that can hold conversations, send voice messages, generate images, read PDFs, write code, search the web, and take autonomous actions.¹⁰ Each shape has a configurable personality, a knowledge base that its creator can populate, long-term and short-term memory settings, and training samples that guide its tone and style.¹³ Creators choose from more than 70 AI engine options, including models from Anthropic (Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Haiku 4.5), OpenAI (ChatGPT-5.3, ChatGPT-5.4), Google (Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 3 Flash Preview), and open-weight models such as Hermes 4 405B and GLM 5.¹³

The platform operates on a freemium model.¹⁰ Free engines carry no cost; premium engines consume "shape credits," a virtual currency where different models have different per-token prices.¹³ Users earn free credits by contributing to the platform and being socially active, and can also purchase credits directly.¹⁰ An auto-top-up feature refills credits automatically when a saved payment method is on file.¹²

Shapes supports several interaction formats: one-on-one chats between a user and a shape, group chats where multiple humans and multiple shapes converse together, and spectator mode where users can watch shapes talk to each other.¹¹ Users can also invite human friends into any chat, lock chats to prevent new members from joining, and moderate conversations within their rooms.¹² The platform hosts shapes based on characters from hundreds of fandoms, including anime series, K-pop groups, games such as FNAF and Genshin Impact, and user-created original characters.¹⁰

Discord growth and termination

Shapes initially distributed its AI agents as bots on Discord, where users could create and deploy shapes in their own Discord servers through the Discord Developer Portal API.¹⁵ The company's Discord community server grew to approximately 10 million members, and over 400,000 shapes were active as Discord bots across the platform.¹⁵

In early May 2025, Discord mass-terminated all Shapes bots and shut down the company's community server.¹⁵ Discord alleged that Circle Labs had violated the Developer Terms of Service by collecting user messages sent to shapes bots for the purpose of training AI models.¹⁶ The company denied the allegations and urged its users to submit mass appeals to Discord stating that "Shapes did not train AI models on discord user data and messages."¹⁵

The appeal campaign drew mixed reactions.¹⁵ Some community members criticized Discord for what they saw as overreach against a project with millions of users, while others expressed skepticism about Shapes' data practices and noted that the company's insistent denial itself raised questions.¹⁵ A prediction market on Manifold Markets asked whether Shapes would be reinstated within a week; the market resolved "No" on May 9, 2025.¹⁶

Standalone platform

Following the Discord termination, Shapes pivoted to its own infrastructure.¹⁰ The company launched talk.shapes.inc as a standalone web chat application and released native mobile apps on both the Apple App Store and Google Play, published under the developer name Circle Labs, Inc.¹⁰¹¹ The iOS app requires iOS 15.0 or later, carries a 13+ age rating, and is 5.9 MB in size.¹⁰ On Google Play, the app has been downloaded more than 50,000 times and holds a 4.2-star rating from 673 reviews as of April 2026.¹¹

The standalone platform preserves the core features of the Discord-era product while adding native capabilities.¹⁰ Voice calls work in background mode on mobile, and the app supports sign-in with Apple and Google account switching.¹⁰ A community chat at talk.shapes.inc/community serves as the central social space, replacing the former Discord server.¹¹

Trust and safety

Shapes runs automated content screening at multiple stages: when a shape is created, whenever its content is updated, on each message sent and received, and through daily platform-wide safety scans.¹⁴ A dedicated trust and safety team provides 24/7 human-in-the-loop monitoring of flagged content, with typical response times within 24 hours for user reports.¹⁴ The platform prohibits shapes that generate or enable child-harm content, harassment, hate speech, and spam, and takes immediate action to remove violating shapes.¹⁴

Creators can mark their shapes as generating sensitive content through a toggle in the shape's privacy settings, and the platform has added automated detection systems to enforce age-restriction requirements for such content.¹⁴ Copyright complaints are handled through a DMCA takedown form, and general reports can be submitted through a trust and safety reporting form or by email to safety@shapes.inc.¹⁴

References

1. Shapes — AI with friends — Founders, Inc.(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
2. Shapes Inc — Lightspeed Venture Partners(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
3. AI bot startup Circle Labs raises $4.2M in Lightspeed-led round — Axios(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
4. circle labs — CREATE-X Demo Day — Georgia Institute of Technology(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
5. Anushk Mittal — Merit Pages