Livestream shopping platform Whatnot announced on July 15, 2026 that it has acquired Shaped, a machine learning company specializing in real-time recommendation and search systems. The deal is designed to strengthen Whatnot’s personalization and discovery capabilities as the platform expands into new product categories.
As part of the acquisition, Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell — a former Meta employee — along with nearly a dozen engineers and AI researchers, will join Whatnot. Murrell will lead the company’s newly formed Applied AI Research group.
Whatnot says the acquisition addresses one of live commerce’s core technical challenges: surfacing the right products to shoppers while inventory, auctions, and buyer demand shift continuously. “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,” said Emmanuel Fuentes, VP of Data and AI at Whatnot. The company says it has reduced recommendation latency from roughly a day to just minutes over the past six years, and expects Shaped’s technology to push those recommendations even closer to real time.
Whatnot’s systems currently process more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of real-time interactions each week. Shaped, which previously counted Outdoorsy and QVC among its customers, developed technology that combines customer data with large language models and machine learning to deliver personalized search and discovery experiences.
The acquisition comes during a period of significant growth for Whatnot, which launched in 2019. Sellers on the platform have surpassed one billion orders, and the company added 20 million buyers over the past year. Earlier in 2026, Whatnot raised $225 million in a Series F round, valuing the company at more than $11 billion. The platform also launched more than 35 new product categories in 2024 and more than 45 additional categories in the first half of 2025. The move comes as other resale platforms, including eBay and Poshmark, also work to integrate AI across their services.
Source: TechCrunch