Whatnot acquires Shaped to speed up live shopping recommendations

Whatnot, a livestream shopping platform launched in 2019, announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Shaped, a machine learning company specializing in real-time recommendation and search systems. The acquisition is designed to strengthen Whatnot's discovery and personalization capabilities as the platform expands into new product categories and serves a growing base of millions of buyers.

Live commerce presents a distinct challenge compared to traditional e-commerce: product inventory, active auctions, and buyer intent shift continuously throughout a broadcast. Emmanuel Fuentes, VP of Data and AI at Whatnot, explained to TechCrunch: "By combining Shaped's technology with Whatnot's existing systems, we can make recommendations faster, more responsive, and more personalized. 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." Over the past six years, Whatnot has invested in improving its recommendation engine, reducing latency from roughly a day to just minutes. Integrating Shaped's technology is expected to push those recommendations even closer to real time. Whatnot's systems already process more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of real-time interactions every week, continuously using that data to refine recommendations.

Shaped was founded to help businesses build AI-powered recommendation systems. The company developed technology combining existing customer data with large language models and machine learning to deliver highly personalized search and discovery experiences. Its customer roster included Outdoorsy and QVC. As part of the acquisition, Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell—who previously worked at Meta—along with nearly a dozen engineers and AI researchers will join Whatnot. Murrell will lead the company's newly formed Applied AI Research group.

The acquisition arrives as Whatnot experiences accelerating growth. The company recently revealed that sellers have surpassed 1 billion orders. Earlier this year, Whatnot raised $225 million（約360億円） in Series F funding, valuing the company at more than $11 billion（約1.8兆円） after adding 20 million buyers over the past year. Whatnot has also significantly broadened its marketplace: it launched more than 35 new categories last year—including art, golf, and vinyl—and more than 45 additional categories during the first half of 2025, with new subcategories continuing to roll out each month. The move also comes as resale competitors such as eBay and Poshmark race to integrate AI throughout their platforms.

Whatnot's acquisition of Shaped reflects the company's strategic pivot toward AI-powered discovery as it expands aggressively across product categories and scales its buyer base. Live commerce presents fundamentally different recommendation challenges than traditional e-commerce: auctions end within minutes, inventory changes constantly, and buyer intent shifts in real time. Whatnot has already invested heavily in solving this problem over six years, reducing latency from a day to minutes, but the addition of Shaped's technology—which combines large language models with machine learning—signals the company believes there is still significant room to accelerate response times further.

The timing of the acquisition aligns with Whatnot's recent milestones: the company surpassed 1 billion seller orders, raised $225 million（約360億円） in Series F funding at a $11 billion（約1.8兆円） valuation, and launched more than 45 new product categories in the first half of 2025 alone. Each expansion increases the complexity of the recommendation problem, making faster, more personalized discovery engines a competitive advantage. Whatnot's scale—processing over 500,000 hours of live video and millions of real-time interactions weekly—provides Shaped with rich data to refine its models. The acquisition also brings Shaped founder Tullie Murrell, who previously worked at Meta, and a team of engineers and AI researchers into Whatnot, positioning the company to develop proprietary recommendation capabilities. This move echoes similar investments by resale competitors like eBay and Poshmark, which are also integrating AI across their platforms.