Whatnot acquires Shaped to integrate real-time AI recommendations for live shopping

Whatnot, a livestream shopping platform, announced it acquired Shaped, an AI startup focused on real-time recommendation and search systems. The deal is intended to strengthen Whatnot’s discovery and personalization capabilities as it expands into new product categories and scales to millions of buyers.

According to Emmanuel Fuentes, VP of Data and AI at Whatnot, the integration of Shaped’s technology will make recommendations faster, more responsive, and more personalized. Fuentes noted that live commerce presents a uniquely hard recommendation problem because inventory, auctions, and buyer intent change in real time, often within minutes.

Whatnot stated that it has spent the last six years improving its recommendation engine, reducing recommendation latency from roughly a day to just minutes. Integrating Shaped’s systems is expected to push recommendations closer to real time.

Whatnot said its systems process more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of real-time interactions every week, using that data to continuously improve recommendations.

Shaped, founded to help businesses build AI-powered recommendation systems, combines existing customer data with large language models and machine learning to deliver personalized search and discovery experiences. Shaped’s customers included Outdoorsy and QVC.

As part of the acquisition, Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell and nearly a dozen engineers and AI researchers will join Whatnot. Murrell will lead Whatnot’s newly formed Applied AI Research group. Murrell previously worked at Meta.

Whatnot reported significant growth, including surpassing 1 billion orders from sellers, raising $225 million in Series F funding last year, and expanding into more than 35 new product categories in 2025 and more than 45 additional categories in the first half of 2026.