Whop Raises $200m at $5.1bn Valuation in Sequoia Deal
Whop has closed a $200 million Series D at a $5.1 billion valuation, with Sequoia Capital and Shopify Ventures leading the round. The company, which is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, announced the raise on 21 October.
The valuation compares with $1.6 billion in February, when Tether, the stablecoin issuer, put $200 million into the company as a strategic investment. Whop has therefore raised $400 million this year across two rounds of identical size, and the new valuation is more than three times the earlier one.
Whop said the proceeds will go towards international expansion and research and development aimed at making payment and advertising markets more efficient. Bloomberg, which first reported the round, put the company’s headcount at 110 and said annualised run-rate revenue recently passed $400 million, from $60 million at the beginning of 2025. Most of that revenue is a percentage of each transaction processed on the platform, with chief executive Steven Schwartz telling Bloomberg the blended average fee is about 6%.
Among Whop’s latest products is Economic Intelligence, a decision engine trained on millions of transactions that recommends the highest-ROI next move for each business. Access is charged as an additional percentage of the revenue earned from using the system, so Whop’s income from the product scales with the revenue the business earns through it.
Whop gives business operators a gamified interface and an API that covers distribution, business creation and money. The company reports roughly 25,000 operators generating $550 million a month, more than 50,000 other people earning a monthly income from services supplied to those businesses, and more than $7 billion in on-platform transactions reaching 185 countries. Customers span the range from product heads at high-growth startups to 16-year-olds running a first business, according to the announcement.
Doug Leone, partner at Sequoia Capital, is taking a board seat as part of the deal, according to Bloomberg. “They’re doing about a half billion revenue, business is doing great, and we’re helping humanity create businesses for people who can’t find a job,” Leone said in the announcement.
Businesses operating on Whop tend to serve tightly defined customer needs, the company said. Examples it gave include invoicing software for haulage firms, private jet booking platforms, data suppliers for humanoid robotics companies, emergency tree removal services and neobanks for dropshippers.
Two other products have shipped in the past three months. Business Blueprints lets a new operator put a sellable business live in a few clicks and has produced more than 21,000 businesses in six weeks. The Whop CLI, released in July, allows any AI agent to work with the company’s API so that operators can run their businesses through prompts; the CLI and Whop’s MCP connectors receive more than 350,000 calls a day from more than 14,700 monthly active users.
“We take inspiration from the traditional economy in designing Whop, and because businesses are the primary conduit by which people earn money and create value, we focus on them as our primary customer,” Schwartz said.
Insight Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, A* and Peter Thiel are among the company’s earlier investors, Bloomberg reported. Founded in 2021, Whop has an office in New York and plans further offices in Colombia and in Europe, per Bloomberg. It has vacancies in engineering, product, sales and operations.
