The PyTorch Foundation, a community-driven hub for open source AI under the Linux Foundation, is announcing today that Shopify has joined as a Platinum member.
Shopify provides essential internet infrastructure for commerce. Shopify’s all-in-one platform makes it easier to start, run, and grow a business, powering sales online, in-store, and everywhere in between. Millions of businesses in 175+ countries use Shopify, from entrepreneurs to brands like Aldo, BarkBox, Carrier, Meta, SKIMS, and Supreme. Machine learning sits at the core of that platform, powering product search, recommendations, fraud protection, and the foundation models reshaping how merchants run and grow their businesses.
“AI is becoming the operating layer for commerce, and we’re convinced that layer needs to be open to reach global scale,” said Mikhail Parakhin, Chief Technical Officer at Shopify. “PyTorch is central to how Shopify builds AI today. Joining the Foundation lets us invest in that base directly and help shape it for the agentic era, rather than just building on top of it.”
PyTorch is a key part of applied machine learning across Shopify. Teams build it into products like Sidekick, Shopify’s merchant-facing AI assistant, and in buyer-facing search and recommendations. As a Platinum member, Shopify intends to invest in the open source ecosystem it depends on: contributing engineering expertise upstream, sharing what it has learned running machine learning at commerce scale, and helping ensure PyTorch keeps serving the demands of real retail and commerce workloads.
“We are excited to welcome Shopify to the PyTorch Foundation as our newest Platinum Member,” said PyTorch Foundation Executive Director, Mark Collier. “Shopify operates where AI meets real buyers and sellers every day, and that vantage point is exactly what the Foundation needs as agents become a front door to commerce.”
As a platinum member, Shopify is granted one seat to the PyTorch Foundation Governing Board. The Board sets policy through our bylaws, mission and vision statements, describing the overarching scope of foundation initiatives, technical vision, and direction.
We’re happy to welcome Shuying Sun, Engineering Manager of the Foundation Model team at Shopify, to both our Governing Board and our Technical Advisory Council (TAC). Shuying drives innovation in AI and large language models to build Shopify’s commerce foundation model, the kind of work that sits at the center of how merchants and buyers will interact with commerce in the agentic era. Before Shopify, she led the ML fundamental platform team at Microsoft Bing & AI, advancing modeling and large-scale training and inference optimization. That combination of applied research and platform experience gives the Board a practitioner’s view of how open source AI gets built and deployed at commerce scale, and her expertise in the engineering that makes large models train and serve reliably will help inform the technical direction of PyTorch and the broader portfolio of projects under the Foundation.
To learn more about how your organization can join the PyTorch Foundation, visit our website.