OpenAI Makes a Mind Grab – Snaps Up Crossing Minds Team as AI Talent War Escalates

OpenAI bought all the talent at Crossing Minds, a San Francisco startup renowned for privacy-focused AI recommendation platforms for online shoppers. The strategic June 27, 2025, acquihire comes as global tech powerhouses aggressively court the world's best artificial intelligence talent.

 

Key Highlights:

 

Personalization Expertise: Crossing Minds, started by Alexandre Robicquet, Emile Contal, and Sebastian Thrun, was an artificial intelligence-powered product recommendation and developer tool firm serving clients like Intuit and Chanel, with a strong emphasis on customer privacy.

 

Full Team Integration: The entire Crossing Minds team will now be located at OpenAI, focusing on enhancing recommendation systems, retrieval-augmented generation, and AI agents. Co-founder Robicquet will be a post-training and agent development researcher.

 

Strategic Growth: The third major acquisition by the firm this year, following Jony Ive's io and Windsurf, comes as it reiterates its aggressive growth in AI capabilities.

 

Industry Impact: The move places OpenAI to compete more fiercely with Amazon and Google in AI-driven personalization, and to improve its shopping assistant and ChatGPT functions.

 

Prospects: OpenAI's acquisition of Crossing Minds' technology sets a new level for the AI talent arena with the promise of accelerated innovations in personalized, privacy-centric AI solution for consumers and businesses.

 

Source: Complete AI Training