Whatnot buys Shaped to boost live shopping recommendations
▼ Summary
– Whatnot acquired Shaped, a machine learning company specializing in real-time recommendation and search systems, to improve discovery and personalization.
– The acquisition aims to help shoppers find products on Whatnot’s live commerce platform, where inventory, auctions, and buyer demand change constantly.
– Shaped’s technology, combining customer data with large language models and machine learning, will be integrated to make recommendations faster and more responsive.
– Shaped’s founder and CEO, Tullie Murrell, along with nearly a dozen engineers, will join Whatnot to lead the new Applied AI Research group.
– The deal follows Whatnot’s significant growth, including over one billion orders and a recent $225 million funding round, as it expands into many new product categories.
Livestream shopping platform Whatnot has officially acquired Shaped, a machine learning firm specializing in real-time recommendation and search systems. The deal, announced Wednesday, is designed to supercharge Whatnot’s personalization and discovery tools as the app scales across new categories and a rapidly growing buyer base.
The acquisition underscores Whatnot’s continued investment in AI to tackle one of live commerce’s toughest problems: helping users find the right products when inventory, auctions, and demand are shifting by the second. Unlike standard e-commerce sites with relatively static product catalogs, Whatnot’s marketplace is in constant flux. Live auctions can wrap up in minutes or stretch for hours, and buyer interest changes throughout a broadcast.
“By combining Shaped’s technology with Whatnot’s existing systems, we can make recommendations faster, more responsive, and more personalized,” said Emmanuel Fuentes, VP of Data and AI at Whatnot. “That speed matters because live commerce is a uniquely hard recommendation problem. Inventory changes by the second, shows start and end continuously, and buyer intent shifts throughout a show.”
Fuentes noted that over the past six years, Whatnot has slashed recommendation latency from roughly a full day to just minutes. Integrating Shaped’s technology is expected to push those suggestions even closer to real time. The platform currently processes more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of real-time interactions each week, feeding that data back into its recommendation engine for continuous improvement.
Shaped was founded to help businesses build AI-powered recommendation systems by blending existing customer data with large language models and machine learning. Its past clients included companies like Outdoorsy and QVC. As part of the acquisition, Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell, along with nearly a dozen engineers and AI researchers, will join Whatnot. Murrell previously worked at Meta before launching Shaped and will now lead Whatnot’s newly formed Applied AI Research group.
The move comes amid a period of explosive growth for Whatnot. Launched in 2019, the company recently announced that sellers have surpassed one billion orders. Earlier this year, Whatnot raised $225 million in Series F funding, pushing its valuation past $11 billion after adding 20 million buyers in the past year alone.
Whatnot has also aggressively expanded its marketplace, rolling out more than 35 new categories last year,including art, golf, and vinyl,and an additional 45 categories during the first half of 2025, with new subcategories launching every month.
The acquisition aligns with a broader industry trend as resale giants like eBay and Poshmark race to embed AI across their platforms, aiming to improve search, discovery, and the overall shopping experience.
(Source: TechCrunch)
