$11bn live shopping app Whatnot buys AI firm Shaped

Livestream shopping platform Whatnot has acquired Shaped, a machine learning startup specializing in real-time search and recommendation systems. The purchase brings Shaped’s founder, Tullie Murrell, and roughly a dozen engineers into Whatnot to lead a newly formed Applied AI Research group. Murrell previously worked at Meta, and the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Live commerce presents a distinct technical hurdle compared to standard e-commerce. Because auctions can end in minutes and inventory shifts constantly, standard recommendation engines struggle to keep pace. “By combining Shaped’s technology with Whatnot’s existing systems, we can make recommendations faster, more responsive, and more personalized,” said Emmanuel Fuentes, Whatnot’s VP of Data and AI. “That speed matters because live commerce is a uniquely hard recommendation problem. Inventory changes by the second, shows start and end continuously, and buyer intent shifts throughout a show.”

Over the past six years, Whatnot has cut its recommendation latency from about a day down to mere minutes. Integrating Shaped’s technology, which combines large language models with existing customer data, is designed to push those recommendations into true real time. This is a significant processing task, with Whatnot’s systems analyzing over 500,000 hours of live video and millions of user interactions weekly.

The acquisition underscores the rapid scaling of the platform, which recently surpassed one billion seller orders. Earlier this year, Whatnot raised $225 million in a Series F round that valued the company at over $11 billion.

This followed the addition of 20 million buyers in the previous twelve months. During that period, the company rapidly broadened its marketplace by launching 35 new categories in 2024 and more than 45 additional categories in the first half of 2025.

For European investors and e-commerce companies, this deal highlights the escalating AI arms race in the global resale market. Domestic platforms face the same fundamental challenge of matching buyers with highly fluid, rapidly changing inventory. Whatnot’s aggressive push into AI—spanning new categories from art and golf to vinyl—sets a clear benchmark for the technological investment required to compete.

Whatnot is not acting in isolation. Established resale giants such as eBay and Poshmark are also racing to embed artificial intelligence throughout their platforms. Shaped previously built its AI-powered discovery tools for clients including QVC and Outdoorsy, proving the broader market demand for sophisticated, real-time personalization.