Whatnot acquires Shaped to power real-time live shopping recommendations

Live shopping application What announced Wednesday that it had acquired In the form ofa machine learning company specializing in real-time recommendation and search systems. The deal aims to enhance Whatnot’s discovery and personalization capabilities as the platform continues to expand across new product categories and millions of buyers.

According to the company, the acquisition helps Whatnot continue its investment in AI as it looks 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.

Unlike traditional e-commerce platforms, where product catalogs remain relatively stable, the Whatnot 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 deliver recommendations faster, more responsive and more personalized,” Emmanuel Fuentes, VP of Data and AI at Whatnot, told TechCrunch. “This speed is important because live trading is a uniquely difficult recommendation problem. Inventory changes in a second, offers start and end continuously, and buyer intent changes throughout the offer.”

The company has spent the past six years improving the speed of its recommendation engine, reducing recommendation latency from roughly one day to just minutes, Fuentes said. The incorporation of Shaped technology is expected to push these recommendations closer to real-time. The company says its systems process more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of real-time interactions every week, using that data to continually improve recommendations.

Founded to help companies build AI-powered recommendation systems, Shaped has developed technology that combines existing customer data with big language models and machine learning to deliver highly personalized search and discovery experiences. Its client list included companies such as Outdoorsy and QVC.

As part of the acquisition, Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell, along with nearly a dozen AI engineers and researchers, will join Whatnot. Morrell will lead the company’s newly formed Applied AI Research group. (It’s worth noting that Morrell worked at Meta before launching Shaped.)

The acquisition comes at a time when Whatnot is experiencing significant growth. The company recently launched in 2019 open Sellers have exceeded 1 billion orders. Last year, Whatnot $225 million In Series F funding, giving the company a valuation of more than $11 billion after adding 20 million buyers over the past year.

What It has also significantly expanded its market, launching more than 35 new categories last year – including art, golf and vinyl – and more than 45 additional categories during the first half of 2026, with new subcategories continuing to roll out every month.

Additionally, this move comes at a time when resale giants are racing to integrate AI into all their platforms, e.g eBay and Poshmark.

This story has been updated to correct dates that incorrectly referred to the first half of 2025. The correct time period is the first half of 2026