Shopify acquires search startup Vantage Discovery for undisclosed amount

Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify has acquired San Jose, Calif.-based artificial intelligence (AI)-powered retailer search startup Vantage Discovery for an undisclosed amount. 

Vantage Discovery CEO Lance Riedel announced the acquisition in a LinkedIn post this past weekend. Riedel co-founded Vantage Discovery with fellow Pinterest engineering alumni Nigel Daley. The search platform aims to move beyond traditional keyword searches with semantic searches and search personalization for shoppers. Semantic search differs from traditional search, which is based on matching search terms with keywords and their variations; it attempts to also consider user intent and the contextual meaning of search terms. 

A Shopify spokesperson told BetaKit that Vantage Discovery’s search platform and team will play a key role in “supercharging” Shopify’s work for both merchants and buyers, but declined to disclose any other details of the transaction. 

RELATED: Shopify merchants can now prompt AI to design a store theme

However, Shopify CTO Mikhail Parakhin signalled that the acquisition could be used to help with advertising in a cryptic post on X. 

“[Vantage Discovery’s] incredible Search platform will level up the search experience for Shopify users,” Parakhin said. “Now, why Search is important is left as an exercise for the inquisitive reader :-)”

When a reply to Parakhin commented on the potential to help merchants advertise, Parakhin said it was a “very, very perceptive comment!”

The acquisition seems to be part of broader effort to bolster Shopify’s AI toolkit, which became apparent when Shopify tapped Parakhin as CTO in August 2024. In a release, the company called him “one of the finest machine learning crafters on the planet.” Before joining Shopify, Parakhin had served as Microsoft’s CEO of advertising and web services, worked on its Bing search engine, and helped build consumer-facing AI products such as Copilot.

Shopify CFO Jeff Hoffmeister revealed during its Q4 earnings call last month that Shopify had also done six “tuck-in” acquisitions in 2024 to bolster its AI expertise, according to Business Insider. Hoffmeister said the people acquired this way were an important source of talent, and that they were “very tactical, thoughtful AI hires.” 

Shopify launched a new AI feature earlier this month to help merchants set up and design their stores by describing their businesses with prompts to create custom digital storefront themes.

Disclosure: BetaKit majority owner Good Future is the family office of two former Shopify leaders, Arati Sharma and Satish Kanwar.

Feature image courtesy Burst.