Whatnot, the live shopping marketplace, said on July 15, 2026, that it had acquired Shaped, a New York machine learning startup that builds real-time ranking systems for recommendations and search. Shaped's founder and chief executive, Tullie Murrell, announced the deal on the company's blog, and TechCrunch first reported it the same day.
Neither company disclosed financial terms. Murrell will set up and lead a new Applied AI Research group inside Whatnot, according to AlleyWatch and other coverage, and nearly a dozen Shaped engineers and researchers will join him there.
Shaped told its customers that nothing would change straight away. The company said it would contact each customer directly with details on next steps and that its team would support the transition, but it did not say how long its hosted platform would remain available.
What Shaped built
Shaped sold a managed AI ranking platform, Shaped Cloud, that companies used to run product recommendations, search and discovery, feed ranking for social and content apps, and retrieval for agents and RAG applications. AlleyWatch described it as a real-time personalization system that returns results in under 50 milliseconds using text, user and session data.
The company said its ranking infrastructure had been used by hundreds of marketplaces and content companies. Coverage of the deal named QVC and Outdoorsy among its customers: Startup Fortune reported that QVC used Shaped for real-time video recommendations in its mobile app, while Outdoorsy used it to improve search relevance based on live session activity.
Shaped also listed SOC 2 Type 2 compliance and a set of data connectors among its features, aimed at companies that wanted ranking models without building the infrastructure in-house.
“Our team of engineers and researchers is joining Whatnot to help accelerate AI across live commerce.”
Why Whatnot is buying
Whatnot runs live video auctions and sales, which makes recommendations harder than on a standard e-commerce site: inventory changes from minute to minute and a show can end before a slow model catches up. Shaped's announcement cited Whatnot's scale, with more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of real-time interactions each week, and said cross-category buying on the platform had grown 170% year over year.
Whatnot said the work will start with matching buyers to relevant live shows, sellers and products as activity changes. TechCrunch reported, as cited by Startup Fortune, that Whatnot had already cut the time needed to generate personalized recommendations from about a day to a few minutes over six years. Shaped's systems are meant to move that closer to real time.
In a company post quoted by Built In, Whatnot said it believes AI will play a foundational role in live commerce and called the purchase a long-term investment in the AI work already under way. Emmanuel Fuentes, Whatnot's vice president of data and AI, said in remarks reported by AlleyWatch that Shaped had been shipping production machine learning for marketplaces like Whatnot for years.
The founders and the funding
Shaped was founded in 2021 by Murrell, Daniel Camilleri and Shai Bruhis, according to AlleyWatch. Murrell previously worked as an AI researcher and machine learning engineer at Facebook, now Meta. Camilleri, the company's chief operating officer, had led UX research at Uber and product research at Afterpay.
The startup went through Y Combinator and raised an $8 million Series A in July 2024 led by Madrona, with participation from Y Combinator and executives and founders from ClickHouse, DocuSign, Okta, Rippling and Stitch Fix. Madrona managing director Karan Mehandru joined its board as part of that round.
AlleyWatch put Shaped's total equity funding at $10 million and listed Liquid 2 Ventures, Uncommon Capital and Tribe Capital as further backers. In his farewell post, Murrell thanked Madrona and Y Combinator for supporting the company from its earliest days.
A buyer with deep pockets
Whatnot has raised heavily to expand its marketplace. Startup Fortune reported that the company closed a $225 million Series F at an $11.5 billion valuation, co-led by DST Global and CapitalG, with Sequoia Capital and Alkeon Capital joining as new investors. AlleyWatch reported that Whatnot launched more than 45 new product categories in the first half of 2026.
Bringing in a ready-made team is a common route for consumer platforms that want specialist machine learning talent quickly. Open questions after the deal include whether outside customers such as QVC and Outdoorsy will keep using Shaped's technology now that its core team works for Whatnot.
