Livestream shopping app Whatnot announced Wednesday that it has acquired Shaped, a machine learning company focused on real‑time recommendation and search systems. The acquisition is intended to bolster Whatnot’s discovery and personalization capabilities as the platform expands into new product categories and serves millions of buyers.
Why the deal matters
According to Whatnot, the purchase supports continued AI investment aimed at solving one of live commerce’s largest problems: helping shoppers find the right products while inventory, auctions, and buyer demand change in real time. Unlike traditional e‑commerce marketplaces where product catalogs are relatively stable, Whatnot’s marketplace is in constant flux and live auctions can end within minutes or run for hours.
Emmanuel Fuentes, VP, Data and AI at Whatnot, told 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.”
Technical impact and data scale
Fuentes said the company has spent the last six years improving the speed of its recommendation engine, cutting recommendation latency from roughly a day to just minutes. Integrating Shaped’s technology is expected to move recommendations even closer to real time. Whatnot says its systems process more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of real‑time interactions every week, and it uses that data to continuously refine recommendations.
What Shaped brings
Shaped was founded to help businesses build AI‑powered recommendation systems. Its technology blends existing customer data with large language models and machine learning to deliver highly personalized search and discovery experiences. Customers included Outdoorsy and QVC.
As part of the acquisition, Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell will join Whatnot along with nearly a dozen engineers and AI researchers. Murrell will lead Whatnot’s newly formed Applied AI Research group. Notably, Murrell previously worked at Meta before founding Shaped.
Growth and market context
The deal comes amid significant growth at Whatnot. Launched in 2019, the company recently revealed that sellers have surpassed one billion orders. Earlier this year, Whatnot raised $225 million in Series F funding, bringing the company’s valuation to over $11 billion after adding 20 million buyers in the past year.
Whatnot has also expanded its marketplace substantially: it launched more than 35 new categories last year — including art, golf, and vinyl — and introduced more than 45 additional categories during the first half of 2025, with new subcategories still being added each month.
The move also aligns with a broader trend of resale platforms integrating AI across their services, as seen with companies such as eBay and Poshmark.
Summary
By acquiring Shaped and bringing Tullie Murrell and her team onto the roster, Whatnot aims to push its recommendation latency closer to real time and deliver faster, more responsive, and more personalized discovery for buyers in a rapidly changing live commerce environment.
