Whatnot acquires startup Shaped: AI revolution in live commerce

Whatnot, one of the largest live commerce platforms in the US, has announced the acquisition of the startup Shaped to expand its AI capabilities. Specializing in machine learning systems, Shaped will now work on improving real-time personalized recommendations and search for Whatnot users. This deal will help millions of buyers on the platform find the products they are looking for in seconds. This is reported by Techcrunch.com reports .

According to TechCrunch, recommendation systems for live streaming sales platforms like Whatnot are extremely complex. Unlike traditional e-commerce platforms, product catalogs here are not static: auctions can last only a few minutes, or inventory can sell out in seconds. Shaped's technology allows for the analysis of these dynamic changes in real-time.

Technological challenges in live commerce

Emmanuel Fuentes, VP of Data and AI at Whatnot, noted that in live commerce, a buyer's interests can change several times during a broadcast. Over the past six years, the company had managed to reduce the latency of its recommendation systems from one day to a few minutes. The integration of Shaped is expected to bring this process to a near-instant (real-time) level.

Currently, Whatnot systems process over 500,000 hours of live video and millions of interactions every week. Algorithms developed by Shaped, combining Large Language Models (LLM) and machine learning, suggest the most relevant live streams to users based on their previous purchases.

New research team and future plans

As part of the deal, Shaped founder and CEO Tullie Murrell, along with over ten engineers and researchers, will join the Whatnot team. It is worth noting that before launching her startup, Murrell worked at Meta. She will now lead the newly formed Applied AI Research group within Whatnot.

Whatnot's growth rate is impressive:

• The number of orders placed by sellers has exceeded 1 billion;
• In the last investment round, the company raised $225 million, bringing its valuation to $11 billion;
• 20 million new buyers have joined the platform in the last year.

Today, Whatnot is not limited to collectibles, having launched sales in over 80 new categories such as art, golf equipment, and vinyl records. At a time when retail giants like eBay and Poshmark are rapidly implementing AI into their platforms, this acquisition by Whatnot is a crucial step toward maintaining competitiveness in the market.