Livestream shopping app Whatnot announced Wednesday that it has acquired Shaped, a machine learning company that specializes in real-time recommendation and search systems. The partnership aims to strengthen Whatnot’s discovery and personalization capabilities as the company continues to expand into new product categories and millions of buyers.
The acquisition will help Whatnot continue to invest in AI to solve one of live commerce’s biggest challenges: helping shoppers find the right products as inventory, auctions, and buyer demand change in real time, the company said.
Unlike traditional e-commerce platforms, where product catalogs are relatively stable, Whatnot’s marketplace is constantly evolving, and live auctions can end within minutes or last for hours.
“By combining Shaped’s technology with Whatnot’s existing systems, we can make recommendations faster, more responsive, and more personalized,” Emmanuel Fuentes, Whatnot’s vice president of data and AI, told TechCrunch. “Speed is key in live commerce because recommendations are unique and difficult. Inventory changes in seconds, shows start and end continuously, and buyer intent changes throughout the show.”
Fuentes said the company has spent the past six years increasing the speed of its recommendation engine, reducing recommendation latency from about a day to just a few minutes. By integrating Shaped’s technology, we expect these recommendations to move even closer to real-time. The company says its systems process more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of real-time interactions each week and use that data to continually improve its recommendations.
Founded to help businesses build AI-powered recommendation systems, Shaped has developed technology that combines existing customer data with large-scale language models and machine learning to deliver highly personalized search and discovery experiences. Its client roster included companies like Outdoorsy and QVC.
As part of the acquisition, Shaped founder and CEO Tully Murrell and more than a dozen engineers and AI researchers will join Whatnot. Murrell will lead the company’s newly created Applied AI Research Group. (Notably, Murrell worked at Meta before launching Shaped.)
The acquisition comes as Whatnot is experiencing significant growth. The company, which launched in 2019, recently revealed that it has received more than 1 billion orders from sellers. Last year, Whatnot raised $225 million in Series F funding, and the company has added 20 million buyers over the past year, taking its valuation to more than $11 billion.
Whatnot has also significantly expanded its market, launching over 35 new categories last year including Art, Golf and Records, and over 45 additional categories in the first half of 2026, with new subcategories continuing to be rolled out every month.
Additionally, the move comes as reseller giants like eBay and Poshmark race to integrate AI across their platforms.
This article has been updated to correct a date that was incorrectly mentioned as early 2025. The correct time period is the first half of 2026.
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