Whatnot, the live social commerce marketplace, has acquired Shaped, a New York-based AI startup that builds real-time ranking systems for recommendations and search. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. As part of the deal, Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell will lead a newly formed applied AI research group at Whatnot, where nearly a dozen Shaped engineers and researchers will join to accelerate the company’s investment in discovery and personalization across its marketplace. “Since the early days of Whatnot, data and applied ML have been at our core, from the earliest collaborative filters to our latest real-time inference and recommendation systems,” remarked Emmanuel Fuentes, VP of Data & AI at Whatnot. “Shaped has been living at this intersection for years, shipping production ready ML & AI for marketplaces like ours. We are excited to welcome the team and incorporate their tech to accelerate our learnings and capabilities to deliver on our mission of building the best social commerce platform possible.”
Since the early days of Whatnot, data and applied ML have been at our core, from the earliest collaborative filters to our latest real-time inference and recommendation systems. Shaped has been living at this intersection for years, shipping production ready ML & AI for marketplaces like ours. We are excited to welcome the team and incorporate their tech to accelerate our learnings and capabilities to deliver on our mission of building the best social commerce platform possible. – Emmanuel Fuentes
Founded in 2021 by Murrell, Daniel Camilleri, and Shai Bruhis, Shaped had raised a total of $10M in equity funding and is backed by Madrona, Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, Uncommon Capital, and Tribe Capital. Shaped built a real-time AI personalization platform that delivers sub-50ms relevance across text, user, and session data, serving as ranking infrastructure for hundreds of marketplaces and content brands. “We are thrilled to integrate Shaped’s product into Whatnot and be part of one of the fastest growing marketplaces ever,” said Murrell. “In a live ecosystem, the standard recommendation playbook just doesn’t apply. You have to balance immediate buyer relevance with the long-term health of the marketplace. Building an AI engine that can manage those multi-sided dynamics at enormous scale is a massive technical challenge, and we’re excited to push the frontier of what’s possible.”
We are thrilled to integrate Shaped’s product into Whatnot and be part of one of the fastest growing marketplaces ever. In a live ecosystem, the standard recommendation playbook just doesn’t apply. You have to balance immediate buyer relevance with the long-term health of the marketplace. Building an AI engine that can manage those multi-sided dynamics at enormous scale is a massive technical challenge, and we’re excited to push the frontier of what’s possible. – Tullie Murrell
The acquisition addresses one of the most technically demanding challenges in live commerce: building AI that can surface the right products to buyers in an inventory environment that shifts by the minute. Whatnot says cross-category buying on its platform has grown 170% year-over-year, and the company has launched over 45 new product categories in just the first half of 2025. Shaped’s infrastructure, which was built specifically for real-time marketplace dynamics, is intended to sharpen those discovery systems as Whatnot scales.
