Shaped

Artificial Intelligence · Live Commerce · Recommendation Systems

Acquisition

Whatnot acquires AI startup Shaped to sharpen live-shopping recommendations

Live auctions end in minutes, forcing recommendation engines to react in seconds rather than overnight batch cycles.

• Whatnot, the livestream shopping marketplace, acquired Shaped, a New York-based AI startup building real-time recommendation and search systems, in a deal with undisclosed financial terms.
• Shaped's technology delivers sub-50ms personalized rankings across text, user and session data, and had already been used by companies like QVC and Outdoorsy to power real-time recommendations.
• Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell, a former Meta machine-learning engineer, will lead a new Applied AI Research group at Whatnot, joined by nearly a dozen Shaped engineers and researchers.
• Founded in 2021, Shaped had raised $10M in total funding from investors including Madrona, Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, Uncommon Capital and Tribe Capital.
• The deal follows Whatnot's $225M Series F that valued the company at $11.5B, as the platform processes more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of real-time interactions weekly.
• Static, catalog-style recommendation systems can't keep pace with live auctions where inventory disappears in seconds, making real-time ranking a core competitive requirement for live commerce platforms.