OpenAI Acquihires Crossing Minds Team to Boost AI Agent Research and Developer Tools

OpenAI Acquihires AI Startup Crossing Minds

Date: June 28, 2025, 6:50 pm IDT

OpenAI has acquired the team behind Crossing Minds, an AI startup known for its product recommendation system. This move comes as Meta continues to recruit OpenAI talent, signaling a competitive landscape for AI expertise.

About Crossing Minds

Founded in 2016 by AI researchers Sebastian Thrun, Emile Contal, and Alexandre Robicquet, Crossing Minds developed an AI-powered recommendation engine tailored for online retailers. Their system automatically generated shopping suggestions by analyzing customer data, helping retailers improve personalization.

The startup also created two AI developer tools:

• A tool for generating embeddings optimized for consumer shopping preferences.
• RAGSys, a system that adds retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) features to AI applications.

Before the acquisition, Crossing Minds raised over $13 million from investors like Shopify and Index Ventures.

Details of the Acquisition

The deal, confirmed by Crossing Minds and initially reported by TechCrunch, is a talent acquisition rather than a new funding round. OpenAI has not disclosed whether it plans to integrate Crossing Minds' technology into its offerings.

Alexandre Robicquet has joined OpenAI in a research role focused on AI agents and post-training processes, which improve AI model outputs after initial development.

Context in the AI Industry

This is OpenAI’s third acquisition this year. Recently, OpenAI completed an all-stock deal to acquire Jony Ive’s io Products Inc. for $6.5 billion. Earlier, it spent around $3 billion to acquire Windsurf.

Crossing Minds was competing with established AI recommendation services like Amazon Personalize and Google Cloud Recommendations AI. In the AI developer tool space, rivals include Hugging Face and Cohere, which provide embeddings and retrieval-augmented generation capabilities.

What This Means for AI Developers and Retailers

OpenAI’s acquisition of Crossing Minds’ team highlights the growing importance of AI-powered personalization and developer tools. For developers, tools like embeddings and RAG systems are becoming essential for building sophisticated AI applications.

Retailers and e-commerce platforms looking to enhance their product recommendations may soon see new innovations stemming from this talent pool within OpenAI’s ecosystem.

For those interested in advancing their AI skills, exploring courses on embeddings, recommendation systems, and retrieval-augmented generation can be a practical next step. Resources are available at Complete AI Training.