Thrive Capital puts $100M into Shopify in rare public-market AI bet
What's the deal? Joshua Kushner's Thrive Capital has taken a roughly $100M stake in Shopify, marking a rare public-market move by the venture firm best known for backing OpenAI, SpaceX, and Stripe. The firm told stakeholders it views the position as a bet on how AI could drive gains in commerce.
Thrive raised more than $10B for its latest fund in February, making the $100M investment a small fraction of its firepower. Shopify's stock has fallen about 40% year to date.
Why now? Shopify's first-quarter revenue grew 34.3% year on year to $3.17B, but second-quarter guidance implied a deceleration to roughly 27.5% growth. Operating-profit forecasts came in below expectations, and shares now trade nearly 46% below their 52-week high.
Thrive appears to view the sell-off as an entry point rather than a warning — a pattern it has followed before. In March 2022, the firm bought a significant position in Carvana when the online car marketplace was in financial distress. It realised a $522M profit on that trade, according to Bloomberg.
What could go wrong? Public equities carry different risks than venture bets. Shopify's slowing growth and weaker guidance spooked investors for a reason — if the deceleration deepens, the AI-commerce thesis may take longer to play out than Thrive expects. The firm's Carvana win was a contrarian trade that worked, but not all contrarian trades do.
The signal: Shopify remains classified as a "late growth" company on Dealroom, the same stage as OpenAI — a reminder that Thrive's thesis treats the e-commerce platform not as a mature public stock but as an AI-infrastructure play still compounding. With venture megafunds now large enough to absorb nine-figure public positions without breaking allocation discipline, the $100 million bet says less about Shopify's near-term guidance and more about how top-tier investors are re-drawing the boundary between growth equity and public markets when an AI catalyst is in view.
Read more: thenextweb.com
