Shaped is a New York-based AI company that builds a real-time relevance engine for recommendations, search, and agent retrieval. Its managed platform, Shaped Cloud, combines embeddings, machine-learning models, and fresh behavioral data to return personalized results in under 50 milliseconds, letting product and engineering teams add for-you feeds, hybrid search, and personalized discovery without building ranking infrastructure from scratch. Founded in 2021 by Tullie Murrell, Daniel Camilleri, and Shai Bruhis, the company raised an $8M Series A led by Madrona in 2024 and was acquired by live-commerce marketplace Whatnot in July 2026.
Orama is an open-source search company building an 'answer engine' for developers - a lightweight, high-performance stack that bundles full-text, vector, and hybrid search with automatic embedding generation and built-in LLMs. Started as the open-source project Lyra and incorporated as OramaSearch Inc. in 2023 by Issac Roth and Michele Riva, its core library ships in under 2KB and runs in the browser, on servers, or at the edge. Orama powers site search and AI answers for developer platforms including nodejs.org, tanstack.com, and solidjs.org, and its OramaCore runtime packages a search engine, vector database, and LLM interface into one deployable unit.
Issac Roth is a Silicon Valley founder, operator and investor who has spent 25-plus years turning hard infrastructure into products developers actually use. He created Red Hat OpenShift out of his startup Makara, was founding CEO of the Node.js company StrongLoop (acquired by IBM, where he became a cloud CTO), and invested as a Venture Partner at Shasta Ventures. Today he is co-founder and CEO of Orama, an open-source search and answer-engine company building a fourth-generation database that fuses full-text search, vector search and built-in LLMs to power AI agents and copilots.
LanceDB builds the data backbone for multimodal AI. Its open-source Lance columnar format and lakehouse let teams store, search, and train on text, images, video and embeddings in one system - replacing the brittle stack of Parquet files, vector stores and feature pipelines that AI teams usually stitch together. Used by Midjourney, Runway, Character.AI, WeRide and others, LanceDB raised a $30M Series A in 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $41M.