Whop has raised $200 million in Series D funding at a $5.1 billion valuation, led by Sequoia Capital and Shopify Ventures, as the company expands from a marketplace for digital products into a broader platform for starting and operating internet businesses.
The financing comes just eight months after Tether announced a $200 million strategic investment in Whop at a $1.6 billion valuation in February 2026. The latest round represents more than a threefold increase in valuation within the same year.
Founded in 2021 by Steven Schwartz, Cameron Zoub and Jack Sharkey, Whop grew out of businesses the founders started as teenagers, including software for sneaker reselling and other online ventures. Schwartz, now CEO, initially met Zoub through an online community when they were 13.
Their experience exposed a recurring problem: starting a digital business required combining separate tools for payments, websites, customer acquisition, subscriptions and fulfillment.
Whop originally focused on helping creators and entrepreneurs sell access to digital products, software, communities and services. It has since expanded into payments infrastructure, advertising, business formation tools and APIs that allow developers to operate businesses programmatically.
The platform now supports approximately 25,000 business operators generating a combined $550 million in monthly revenue, according to the company. Whop also says more than 50,000 additional people earn income each month by providing services to businesses operating on the platform.
Those figures represent economic activity generated by businesses using Whop, not Whop's own revenue. Bloomberg separately reported that Whop had surpassed approximately $400 million in annualized company revenue, with most of its revenue coming from transaction fees.
Recent product launches show where the business is heading. Whop introduced Business Blueprints, which allows users to launch predefined business models, and says more than 21,000 businesses were created through the feature within its first six weeks.
Its command-line interface and Model Context Protocol integrations allow AI agents to interact directly with Whop's business infrastructure. The company reports more than 350,000 API-related calls per day and over 14,700 monthly active users across these tools.
Whop has also introduced Economic Intelligence, a system that uses transaction data to recommend actions intended to improve business performance. The company plans to monetize the product through an additional share of revenue generated using its recommendations.
The new capital will support international expansion, payments infrastructure and advertising products.
Whop is positioning itself as infrastructure for a growing economy of independent businesses, where AI lowers the cost of creating software, delivering services and operating online companies.
Its challenge will be competing with established platforms such as Shopify, Stripe and other commerce and payments providers while maintaining trust across a marketplace containing businesses with very different risk profiles.
The next question is whether Whop can turn its rapidly expanding transaction volume into durable revenue and become a primary operating platform for online businesses rather than simply another place to sell digital products.