Whatnot has acquired Shaped, a machine learning startup focused on real-time recommendation and search tools, as the livestream shopping platform works to improve how buyers discover products during fast-moving sales events. The company said the deal is intended to strengthen personalization and search as its marketplace keeps expanding into new categories and reaches more users.
According to the report, Whatnot sees recommendation quality as one of the toughest problems in live commerce because inventory can shift quickly, auctions can end in minutes or stretch much longer, and shopper intent can change during a broadcast. Emmanuel Fuentes, Whatnot’s vice president of data and AI, said combining Shaped’s technology with Whatnot’s existing systems should make recommendations faster and more responsive. He added that the company has already reduced recommendation latency from about a day to a matter of minutes over the past six years, and expects the acquisition to move those results even closer to real time.
Whatnot said its systems handle more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of real-time interactions each week, using that activity to improve recommendations continuously. Shaped was founded to help businesses build AI-powered recommendation systems, blending customer data with large language models and machine learning. Its customers included Outdoorsy and QVC. As part of the acquisition, founder and CEO Tullie Murrell will join Whatnot along with nearly a dozen engineers and AI researchers, and he will lead the company’s new Applied AI Research group.
The deal comes during a period of rapid growth for Whatnot. The company, launched in 2019, said sellers have now surpassed one billion orders. Earlier this year, it raised $225 million in Series F funding at a valuation of more than $11 billion after adding 20 million buyers over the previous year. Whatnot also expanded aggressively across its marketplace, introducing more than 35 new categories last year and more than 45 more in the first half of 2025, with additional subcategories still being added each month. The acquisition also reflects a broader trend across resale platforms, where companies such as eBay and Poshmark are increasingly adding AI features.
Source: techcrunch.com
