Whatnot Acquires Shaped to Accelerate AI Across Live Commerce
Today, we're announcing that Whatnot has acquired Shaped, a machine learning company that builds real-time ranking systems for recommendations and search. The acquisition brings Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell and nearly a dozen engineers and researchers to Whatnot, where Murrell will form and lead Whatnot's applied AI research group, helping accelerate our investment in AI across the marketplace, starting with discovery and personalization.
One of the best parts of shopping in person is discovering something you weren't looking for. On Whatnot, our discovery systems bring that same experience online. People might come looking for one thing, but they often leave having found a new seller, category, or community. Those unexpected discoveries are what power live shopping, and that’s becoming even more important as the marketplace grows.
We’ve already seen this happen at scale. Cross-category buying is up 170% year over year, a strong signal that buyers want to explore. Last year, we launched more than 35 new categories. In the first half of this year, we've already launched more than 45, with new subcategories continuing to roll out every month. As more sellers and products join Whatnot, helping buyers discover what’s next becomes one of the biggest opportunities for AI.
AI for Live Commerce
Building great discovery on Whatnot requires AI built for a live marketplace. Unlike traditional e-commerce, inventory changes minute to minute, live shows could end in a minute or run for hours, and every interaction creates a new signal about what buyers want to see next.
AI has been a core part of Whatnot since our founding and already powers many of the experiences across the marketplace. It helps buyers discover live shows, products, and sellers they'll love. It helps sellers create listings faster, improves trust and safety, and continuously improves recommendations across the marketplace. Every week, our systems process more than half a million hours of live video and millions of real-time interactions, making recommendations smarter as the marketplace evolves.
The addition of Shaped builds on that foundation. Together, we're bringing complementary strengths across the AI stack, from infrastructure and research to production systems, so we can advance recommendations and match buyers to the right shows even faster.
Founded by former Meta engineer Murrell, Shaped built AI infrastructure used by hundreds of marketplaces and content brands. With our existing AI and engineering teams, we'll continue investing in ranking, search, and personalization to connect the right buyers with the right sellers in real time. Solving that is one of the hardest AI problems in ecommerce. Buyers, sellers, and inventory are constantly changing, so our models have to do more than predict what you'll want next. They have to make the marketplace better over time.
Investing for the Long Term
We believe AI will play a foundational role in the future of live commerce, and some of the most valuable problems ahead of us won't be solved in a few months. Teaching models to understand what's actually happening in a live video. Search that spans everything on Whatnot, from a show that's live right now to a product listed seconds ago. Ranking that helps buyers find relevant shows while supporting marketplace quality, trust, and long-term growth.
That's why this acquisition is a long-term investment in the AI work already underway at Whatnot, adding talented people and technology that help us move faster. We're looking forward to building what's next for live commerce together.
— The Whatnot Team
