Live shopping app Whatnot announced Wednesday that it has acquired Shaped, a machine learning company that specializes in real-time search and recommendation systems. The deal aims to strengthen Whatnot’s discovery and personalization capabilities as the platform continues to expand across new product categories and millions of shoppers.

According to the company, the acquisition helps Whatnot continue its investment in AI as it seeks to solve one of live commerce’s biggest challenges: helping shoppers find the right products while inventory, auctions and buyer demand change in real time.

Unlike traditional e-commerce platforms, where product catalogs remain relatively stable, the Whatnot marketplace is constantly evolving and live auctions can end in minutes or last hours.

“By combining Shaped’s technology with Whatnot’s existing systems, we can make faster, more responsive, and more personalized recommendations,” Emmanuel Fuentes, vice president of data and artificial intelligence at Whatnot, told TechCrunch. “That speed is important because live commerce is an exceptionally difficult recommendation problem. Inventory changes every second, shows start and end continually, and buyer intent changes throughout a show.”

Fuentes said the company has spent the last six years improving the speed of its recommendation engine, reducing recommendation latency from about a day to just a few minutes. The integration of Shaped’s technology is expected to bring those recommendations even closer to real-time. The company says its systems process more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of real-time interactions each week, and use that data to continually improve recommendations.

Founded to help companies create AI-powered recommendation systems, Shaped developed technology that combines existing customer data with large language models and machine learning to deliver highly personalized search and discovery experiences. His client list included companies like Outdoorsy and QVC.

As part of the acquisition, Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell, along with nearly a dozen AI engineers and researchers, will join Whatnot. Murrell will lead the company’s newly formed Applied AI research group. (Notably, Murrell worked on Meta before releasing Shaped.)

The acquisition comes at a time when Whatnot is experiencing significant growth. Launched in 2019, the company recently revealed that sellers have surpassed 1 billion orders. Last year, Whatnot raised $225 million in Series F funding, giving the company a valuation of more than $11 billion after adding 20 million buyers over the past year.

Whatnot has also significantly expanded its marketplace, launching more than 35 new categories last year (including art, golf and vinyl) and more than 45 additional categories during the first half of 2026, with new subcategories continuing to roll out every month.

Additionally, the move comes as reselling giants compete to integrate AI into their platforms, such as eBay and Poshmark.

This story has been updated to correct dates that incorrectly referred to the first half of 2025. The correct time period is the first half of 2026.