Whop Raises $200 Million Series D, Pushing Valuation to $5.1 Billion

The round is the company’s second $200 million raise of 2026 and brings Sequoia’s Doug Leone onto its board.

Whop has raised a second $200 million round in 2026, this time a Series D led by Sequoia Capital and Shopify Ventures at a $5.1 billion valuation. The company announced the round on October 21. Its first $200 million of the year came from Tether in February, at a $1.6 billion valuation.

Whop was founded in 2021 by three founders who met as teenagers while building software to track sneaker releases, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the new round. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with an office in New York, and employs about 110 people.

Its customers are business operators, from heads of product at high-growth startups to first-time founders aged 16. Whop gives them a gamified interface and an extensive API powering distribution, business creation and money. The company says roughly 25,000 operators generate $550 million on the platform every month and that more than 50,000 other people are paid monthly for services to those businesses. Cumulative on-platform transactions stand above $7 billion across 185 countries.

“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,” said Steven Schwartz, co-founder and CEO.

In its announcement, the company connected the raise to entry-level hiring, which it said is at an all-time low, citing Forbes, and to AI calling traditional career paths into question. It casts itself as a path for people to build a livelihood of their own.

According to the company, most businesses on Whop serve hyper-specific customer needs, and the internet has made it possible to reach customers in segments once too small or fragmented to build a business around. It listed neobanks for dropshippers, data suppliers for humanoid robotics companies, emergency tree removal services, invoicing software for trucking companies and private jet booking platforms as examples of businesses built natively on the platform.

For new operators, Whop launched Business Blueprints six weeks before the announcement. The product lets a user launch a ready-to-sell business in a few clicks, and more than 21,000 businesses have been created through it so far. A company blog post explains that a blueprint is a business that is already running, so deploying one copies the products, their pricing and the website that sells them, wired to checkout; operators can also describe a business in a chat and have Whop build the site, or clone an existing site from its URL.

The company has also released the Whop CLI, which lets any AI agent drive its API. Together with Whop’s MCP connectors, it handles more than 350,000 daily calls from more than 14,700 monthly active users. Economic Intelligence, a decision engine trained on millions of transactions, recommends the move with the highest ROI for each business. Economic Intelligence costs a business a further percentage of the revenue it earns through the system.

Whop said the new capital will accelerate global expansion and research and development in payments and advertising. Sequoia partner Doug Leone is joining the board, Bloomberg reported. “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.

Bloomberg also reported that Whop’s annualized run-rate revenue recently topped $400 million, from $60 million at the start of 2025, that most of its revenue is a percentage of each transaction operators process, and that earlier investors include Peter Thiel, A*, Insight Partners and Bain Capital Ventures. The company plans to open offices in Colombia and in Europe, per the report, and has open roles across engineering, product, sales and operations.