Whatnot, the livestream shopping platform, has acquired Shaped, a machine learning company specializing in real-time recommendation and search technology. The acquisition aims to strengthen Whatnot’s personalization capabilities as it expands across new product categories and its buyer base grows.
Emmanuel Fuentes, Whatnot’s VP of Data and AI, said combining Shaped’s technology with Whatnot’s existing systems would make recommendations faster and more responsive, addressing the unique challenges of live commerce, where inventory and buyer intent shift continuously during auctions that can last minutes or hours. Fuentes said the company has spent six years reducing recommendation latency from about a day to just minutes, and expects the integration to push that closer to real time. Whatnot said its systems process more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of interactions weekly to refine recommendations.
Shaped, whose past clients included Outdoorsy and QVC, built technology combining customer data with large language models for personalized search and discovery. As part of the deal, founder and CEO Tullie Murrell, along with nearly a dozen engineers and researchers, will join Whatnot, with Murrell leading a newly formed Applied AI Research group.
The acquisition follows a period of rapid growth for Whatnot, which recently surpassed 1 billion orders and raised $225 million in Series F funding at a valuation exceeding $11 billion.
