Whop, a company whose software lets people start, sell from and collect payments for online businesses, has raised a $200m Series D at a valuation of $5.1bn. It announced the round on 21 October 2026 in a release issued from New York.
The company said Sequoia and Shopify Ventures led the round. Bloomberg, in a report republished by Investing.com, described Sequoia as the lead with Shopify's venture arm taking part, and put the size of the round at $205m. Whop's own release gives $200m.
It is Whop's second raise of 2026. In February, the stablecoin issuer Tether made a $200m strategic investment in the company at a $1.6bn valuation, according to the release.
“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.”Steven Schwartz, Co-founder and CEO, Whop
What Whop does
Whop sells to what it calls business operators, a group that ranges from product leads at fast-growing startups to teenagers launching their first venture. It gives them a game-like interface and an API that handle distribution, setting up a business and moving money.
The company said about 25,000 operators bring in roughly $550m a month through Whop, and that more than 50,000 other people earn money each month by working for or supplying those businesses. In total it handles more than $7bn in transactions on its platform, reaching people in 185 countries.
Many of the businesses serve narrow niches. Examples given in the release include invoicing software for trucking firms, emergency tree removal, private jet booking, banking services for dropshippers and marketplaces that sell data to humanoid robot makers.
Bloomberg reported that Whop's annualised revenue run rate recently passed $400m, up from $60m at the start of last year, citing co-founder and chief executive Steven Schwartz. Most of that revenue comes from a cut of the transactions processed on the platform, with a blended average fee of 6%, according to the report.
Who invested
Doug Leone, who previously ran Sequoia, is joining Whop's board, Bloomberg reported. It said the deal is his first since he returned to active investing earlier this year, and that Sequoia had passed on Whop in the past before changing its mind after seeing that the businesses on the platform were growing rather than churning.
In the release, Leone said the company was doing about half a billion in revenue. Earlier backers named by Bloomberg include Peter Thiel, A-Star Capital, Insight Partners and Bain Capital Ventures. Whop has not disclosed its total funding to date.
New products and plans
Whop said it launched three products in the past three months. Business Blueprints lets a new operator set up a ready-made business in a few clicks; more than 21,000 businesses were created with it in the six weeks after launch. The Whop CLI, released in July, lets AI agents use the company's API so that operators can run their businesses through prompts. Together with its MCP connectors it handles more than 350,000 calls a day and has more than 14,700 monthly active users, the company said.
The third, Economic Intelligence, is a recommendation engine trained on millions of transactions that suggests each business's next move. Businesses that use it pay Whop an extra share of the revenue it generates.
Whop said the new money will go into global expansion and research and development aimed at payments and advertising. It was founded in 2021 by three people who met as teenagers while writing software to track sneaker releases, according to Bloomberg. The company is based in Palo Alto, California, has an office in New York and is hiring in engineering, product, sales and operations. It has not disclosed its headcount.
Company website: whop.com