Live-shopping app Whatnot is in talks to nearly double its valuation to $20bn

The startup, which sells everything from sneakers to sports cards over livestream, is raising again barely a year after an $11.5bn round, as live commerce catches on in the West.

Whatnot, the livestream-shopping platform where hosts sell sneakers, trading cards, and vinyl to a live audience, is in talks to raise money at a valuation of about $20 billion. The figure would nearly double the $11.5 billion the company was worth as recently as late 2024.

The pace of the markup is the story. A near-doubling in under a year puts Whatnot among the fastest-appreciating consumer startups around, at a time when venture money has flowed overwhelmingly toward artificial intelligence rather than shopping apps.

Whatnot runs live video auctions and sales across categories from fashion to collectables, taking a commission on each transaction, a model that turns online shopping into something closer to entertainment.

The mechanics are half the appeal. A host holds up an item, buyers bid or tap to purchase in real time, and the urgency of a live sale, the countdown, the banter, the scarcity, does work that a static product page never could.

The numbers behind it are real. The company says it handled about $8 billion in livestream sales over the past year across North America and Europe, the kind of volume that justifies, at least to its backers, a valuation usually reserved for software firms.

The investor roster reads like a who’s who. Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Google’s CapitalG have all backed Whatnot, the same names that chase the biggest rounds in technology, now betting that live commerce is more than a novelty.

The idea is not new, just newly working in the West. Livestream shopping has been enormous in China for years, where platforms like Taobao turned hosts into salespeople for millions of viewers, and Western investors have long waited for the format to cross over.

Whatnot’s bet is that it finally has. The company has grown by leaning into niche communities, the collectors and resellers for whom a live auction is both a marketplace and a hangout, rather than trying to be a general store.

It has also started buying capability. This month Whatnot acquired Shaped, a startup that builds real-time recommendation systems, a purchase aimed at pointing viewers toward the streams and items most likely to make them spend.

That acquisition hints at where the money would go. A larger raise would fund the recommendation engine, expansion in Europe, and the fight for hosts and buyers against social platforms circling the same behaviour.

Because the competition is coming. TikTok, Instagram, and Amazon have all pushed into live and social shopping, and Whatnot’s independence is both its advantage, a platform built for this alone, and its vulnerability against far larger rivals.

The valuation, for now, is a talk rather than a term sheet. Business Insider frames it as a round under discussion, and startup valuations at this stage can move before they are signed, especially in a market as selective as this one.

Still, the direction is telling. That investors would price a shopping app at $20 billion, in a year when nearly every large cheque has gone to AI, suggests live commerce has graduated from experiment to category.

It also stands out for what it is not. In a funding market fixated on AI models and infrastructure, Whatnot is a reminder that a consumer business with real transactions can still command a software-sized valuation, provided the growth is there.

The risk is the one every marketplace faces. Whatnot’s value rests on keeping hosts and buyers on the same platform, and that loyalty can erode quickly if a bigger rival offers better terms or a larger audience.

For now, the momentum is with the company. A near-$20 billion valuation would confirm that livestream shopping has arrived in the West, and that Whatnot, for the moment, is the name investors are willing to pay up for.