Whatnot acquires Shaped to power real-time shopping recommendations

Whatnot, the livestream shopping app, has acquired Shaped, a machine learning company that specializes in real-time recommendation and search systems, to strengthen its discovery and personalization capabilities. Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell, along with nearly a dozen engineers and AI researchers, will join Whatnot, where Murrell will lead a newly formed Applied AI Research group. Murrell previously worked at Meta before founding Shaped, whose customers included Outdoorsy and QVC.

Live commerce — video-based shopping where hosts sell products directly to viewers in real time — poses a recommendation challenge unlike traditional e-commerce, since inventory, auctions, and buyer intent can shift within seconds. Emmanuel Fuentes, Whatnot’s VP of Data and AI, said the company has spent 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 push those recommendations even closer to real time. “By combining Shaped’s technology with Whatnot’s existing systems, we can make recommendations faster, more responsive, and more personalized,” Fuentes said. Whatnot’s systems process more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of real-time interactions every week, feeding that activity back into the recommendation engine.

The acquisition comes amid significant growth for Whatnot. Launched in 2019, the company recently said its sellers have surpassed one billion orders. Among the other figures behind that growth:

• $225 million in Series F funding raised earlier this year, valuing the company at more than $11 billion
• 20 million buyers added over the past year
• More than 35 new categories launched last year, and more than 45 additional categories launched in the first half of 2025

The move also comes as resale giants eBay and Poshmark race to integrate AI throughout their platforms.

Why it matters

Live commerce demands instantaneous personalization because auctions and inventory shift by the second, making real-time recommendation engines a competitive edge against traditional e-commerce platforms.