Shaped Acquired by Whatnot

Shaped, the machine learning company building real-time recommendation and search systems, has been acquired by livestream shopping platform Whatnot. The deal brings Shaped’s technology in-house as Whatnot strengthens discovery and personalization across a marketplace that now spans millions of buyers and a rapidly widening set of product categories.

Live commerce is a uniquely hard recommendation problem. Traditional e-commerce catalogs stay relatively stable; Whatnot’s marketplace changes by the second — inventory turns over, auctions end within minutes or run for hours, and buyer intent shifts across the span of a single show. The platform processes more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of real-time interactions every week, and has spent six years cutting recommendation latency from roughly a day down to minutes. Shaped’s technology is expected to push that closer to real time.

Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell will lead Whatnot’s newly formed Applied AI Research group, joined by nearly a dozen engineers and AI researchers. Shaped’s platform paired customer data with large language models and machine learning to power personalized search and discovery for companies including Outdoorsy and QVC.

The acquisition lands amid steep growth for Whatnot. Launched in 2019, the company recently passed 1 billion seller orders and raised $225 million in Series F funding at a valuation above $11 billion, adding 20 million buyers over the past year. It launched more than 35 new categories last year — art, golf, and vinyl among them — and more than 45 additional categories in the first half of 2026.

Every day, over 328M terabytes of data are created, fueling an endless stream of information. Shaped built a platform to power AI-driven recommendations and search, positioning itself as the essential infrastructure for transforming behavior into relevance.

To help Shaped stand out as a category leader, Landscape crafted an evolved brand and website that empowers developers to create intuitive web experiences in an infinite-content paradigm.