Thrive Capital bets $100 million on Shopify, because sometimes the best AI trade is a beaten-down stock

At a glance:

• Thrive Capital has taken a roughly $100 million stake in Shopify.
• Shopify's stock is down approximately 40% year-to-date following slowing growth guidance.
• The investment is framed as a bet on AI transforming commerce, similar to Thrive's early backing of OpenAI.

Thrive's Contrarian Bet on Shopify

Thrive Capital, the venture firm renowned for its early investments in AI trailblazers like OpenAI, SpaceX, and Stripe, has made a rare public-market move by taking a roughly $100 million stake in Shopify. This investment, disclosed via Bloomberg, is less about the sum—minuscule relative to Thrive's newly raised $10 billion fund—and more about the signal it sends regarding where elite investors are finding value. Shopify's stock has plummeted approximately 40% this year after the company projected slowing revenue growth, making it a contrarian pick in a market obsessed with AI valuations.

The firm told stakeholders that the Shopify position is a bet on how artificial intelligence could drive gains in commerce. This framing ties the investment to Thrive's overarching thesis: AI will restructure the economics of every industry it touches, from defence to drug discovery to, now, the software that powers online retail. By applying this lens to a public company, Thrive is diverging from its traditional startup focus, suggesting that even established players can offer asymmetric opportunities when viewed through an AI prism.

The Crossover Play: Venture Firms in Public Equities

Thrive is part of a small but growing cohort of venture firms that have started investing in public equities alongside their traditional startup portfolios. The firm is registered as an investment adviser, a designation that allows it to use the same funds for public and private positions. So are Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, two other prominent firms that have made similar moves. This trend reflects a structural shift in venture capital, as startups take longer to go public—the median time from founding to IPO now exceeds a decade for many—leaving a gap where late-stage private valuations soar while public comparables trade at discounts.

The precedent within Thrive’s own portfolio is instructive. In March 2022, the firm bought a significant position in Carvana, the online car marketplace, at a time when the company was in financial distress. Thrive realized a $522 million profit on the trade, according to Bloomberg. The Carvana bet was not venture investing in any traditional sense; it was a contrarian public-market play, and it worked. This success has emboldened Thrive to pursue similar opportunities, with Shopify representing the latest test of whether the pattern holds.

Shopify's Current Challenges and AI Ambitions

Shopify's first-quarter revenue grew 34.3% year on year to $3.17 billion, but its second-quarter guidance implied a deceleration to roughly 27.5% growth, and operating-profit forecasts came in below expectations. The stock slumped, and shares are now trading nearly 46% below their 52-week high. However, Thrive appears to view the sell-off as an entry point rather than a warning. The company has spent the past year trying to move upmarket, shifting from its small-business roots to court larger retailers, betting that bigger clients will accelerate growth beyond what its existing base can deliver.

The AI angle is central to that strategy. Shopify launched what it calls "agentic commerce" earlier this year, a sales channel that allows merchants to surface products directly inside AI chat platforms such as ChatGPT. AI-driven orders on the platform grew 15 times year on year in 2025, according to the company. The bet is that as consumers begin interacting with AI assistants rather than search engines, the infrastructure that connects merchants to those assistants will become as important as the storefront itself. This is the thesis Thrive is underwriting: not that Shopify's current growth rate justifies a higher multiple, but that AI will transform the economics of commerce in ways the market is not yet pricing in.

Industry-Wide Shift in Valuation Strategies

Other venture firms are making comparable public bets. Accel, which typically backs early-stage software companies, has invested in Nebius Group, the cloud-computing provider. Sequoia Capital bought additional shares in Figma this year, building on a position it first established when it backed the design tool as a startup in 2019. Thrive itself holds public positions in Figma, StubHub, and Oscar Health, the health-insurance company that Kushner co-founded. This pattern reflects a broader recalibration among top VCs, who are increasingly looking to public markets for upside as private valuations—OpenAI at $852 billion, Anthropic approaching $900 billion—leave less room for growth.

In a market where AI valuations invite comparisons to the dot-com era, the beaten-down public company may offer better risk-adjusted returns than the private unicorn. Shopify, with its established profitability and AI integration roadmap, presents a compelling case study. The investment also highlights how venture firms are leveraging their sectoral expertise—here, AI—to identify mispricings in public markets, blurring the lines between traditional venture capital and hedge fund strategies.

The Bigger Picture: Risks and Rewards for Thrive

Thrive's $10 billion fund, raised in February, is its largest ever, and the Shopify position suggests that Joshua Kushner sees the public market as an increasingly important part of the opportunity set. When private valuations are measured in hundreds of billions, and public stocks in the same sectors have been discounted by 40%, the arithmetic can favor the listed company. However, whether Thrive is right about Shopify depends on whether AI commerce becomes as transformative as the firm believes.

The risks are palpable: Shopify's deceleration could be the beginning of a structural slowdown as competition from Amazon, Temu, and an expanding ecosystem of AI-native commerce platforms intensifies. But Thrive has been willing to take concentrated, contrarian positions before—in Carvana, in OpenAI before it was fashionable, in defence before it was lucrative—and the returns have justified the approach. The Shopify bet is the latest test of whether the pattern holds, with AI as the catalyst and public market volatility as the entry point.