Today we’re announcing that Shaped has been acquired by Whatnot, the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe. Our team of engineers and researchers is joining Whatnot to help accelerate AI across live commerce.
Why Whatnot
When we started Shaped, the thesis was simple: every company with a catalog and an event stream deserves state-of-the-art ranking, not just the ones that have huge ML teams and AI labs. Over the past few years, we built that platform, and it’s been used by hundreds of marketplaces and content companies.
Along the way, we kept running into a category of problem that the standard recommendation playbook doesn’t solve: live marketplaces. When inventory changes minute to minute, shows run for hours, and every interaction shifts what should be ranked next, you can’t just fine-tune a static retrieval and ranking stack. You have to rethink evaluation, exploration, and how you balance a buyer’s next purchase against the long-term health of the marketplace.
Whatnot is the most interesting place in the world to work on that problem. Their systems process more than 500,000 hours of live video and millions of real-time interactions every week, and cross-category buying is up 170% year over year. The discovery problem there is genuinely open research territory, at a scale where the answers matter.
Rather than serving that problem from the outside, we decided to go work on it directly, at the company defining the future of live commerce.
What This Means for Shaped Customers
Nothing changes today. We’re reaching out to every customer directly with details on what comes next, and our team will support you through the transition. In the meantime, questions can go to support@shaped.ai.
Building for our customers has been the best part of this company. Many of you took a bet on a small team with a strong opinion about how ranking infrastructure should work, and you pushed the product further than we could have alone. Thank you.
Thank You
To everyone who has been part of Shaped: this outcome exists because of the quality of what you built and how you built it. I’m proud of this team and everything it shipped.
To our investors, especially Madrona and Y Combinator, thank you for backing us from the earliest days.
We’re building a world where discovery works. The next chapter of that is at Whatnot.
Tullie Murrell
CEO, Shaped