Live Commerce Platform Whatnot Raises $545 Million to Speed AI Expansion

Whatnot raised $545 million in a Series G funding round to grow its live commerce platform, the company said in a Friday (Aug. 7) press release emailed to PYMNTS.

The round increased Whatnot’s valuation to $20 billion, up from the $11.5 billion valuation the company achieved in an October 2025 Series F round in which it raised $225 million.

“This investment helps us to build better tools, bring AI to more parts of the selling experience, help sellers reach more buyers, expand into new markets, and continue building the world’s biggest and most trusted marketplace,” Whatnot Co-Founder and CEO Grant LaFontaine said in the release.

Whatnot’s live commerce platform currently operates in North America, the United Kingdom and Europe, according to the release.

While small businesses were the earliest adopters of the platform, businesses of all sizes are now tapping its live commerce capabilities, LaFontaine said.

During the first half of the year, Whatnot’s gross merchandise volume (GMV) surpassed the $8 billion it achieved in the full year of 2025. In addition, over the past year, the number of buyers using the platform more than doubled, the number of sellers reaching more than $1 million in lifetime sales more than doubled, and the share of sellers who sell full time on the platform grew by 25%, per the release.

Whatnot said in a Friday blog post that since it launched its platform, its early sellers “turned live shopping from a thing you had to explain into a way people expect to shop.”

The new artificial intelligence-powered tools Whatnot plans to develop with the new funding include smarter listings to help sellers reach more customers, deeper business insights to help sellers make better decisions, and integrations that simplify selling on Whatnot and reduce the amount of time sellers spend on administrative work, according to the press release.

It was reported in July that Whatnot acquired Shaped, a machine learning startup that builds real-time recommendation and search infrastructure.

Whatnot uses AI like a behind-the-scenes assistant, speeding things up while keeping the spotlight on the people who make live commerce fun, Armand Wilson, chief revenue officer at Whatnot, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in an interview posted in November 2025.

Whatnot’s latest funding round was led by ICONIQ, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Avra, according to the Friday press release.

ICONIQ General Partner Yoonkee Sull said in the release that ICONIQ was impressed by how businesses are growing on the Whatnot platform and that the platform’s success in attracting small businesses, retailers and global brands “is a powerful signal of where commerce is headed.”

Bejul Somaia, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, said in the release that Whatnot has demonstrated that “live is a new and accelerating channel to fuel growth for sellers of all sizes.”