Whop, a US technology company, has announced a $200 million Series D funding round at a $5.1 billion valuation. Sequoia and Shopify Ventures led the round, which was announced on October 21.
It is the company’s second $200 million raise of 2026. In February, Tether made a strategic investment of the same size at a $1.6 billion valuation, which puts the new round at more than three times that price. Whop said the funding will accelerate its global expansion and research and development intended, in its words, to make payment and advertising markets radically more efficient.
Whop says more than $7 billion has moved through the platform, reaching people in 185 countries. Its customers are business operators, from product leaders at high-growth startups to first-time entrepreneurs as young as 16, and the company provides them with a gamified interface and an extensive API that powers distribution, business creation and money. Roughly 25,000 operators generate $550 million on Whop each month, according to the company, which also says it delivers a monthly income to more than 50,000 other people who provide services to those businesses.
“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.
The announcement placed the raise in the context of a changing labor picture. Whop said AI is calling traditional career paths into question and, citing a Forbes report, that entry-level job opportunities are at an all-time low. The company describes itself as a way for individuals to own their economic futures.
The company said most of the businesses built on it serve hyper-specific customer needs, and that the internet has made it practical to serve customer groups that were once too small or too fragmented to sustain a business. Examples named in the announcement include data suppliers for humanoid robotics companies, neobanks for dropshippers, invoicing software for trucking companies, private jet booking platforms and emergency tree removal services.
Business Blueprints, launched six weeks before the announcement, lets new operators launch a ready-to-sell business in a few clicks; more than 21,000 businesses have since been created through it. According to a company blog post, deploying a blueprint copies an existing running business, including its products and pricing, to a new site that can take payments at once. Other recent releases include the Whop CLI, which makes the company’s API compatible with any AI agent. Together with Whop’s MCP connectors, it receives more than 350,000 calls a day from more than 14,700 monthly active users. Economic Intelligence, a decision engine trained on millions of transactions, recommends the highest-ROI next move for each business. Businesses pay for Economic Intelligence with an additional percentage of the revenue they earn from it.
Doug Leone, partner at Sequoia Capital, said in the announcement: “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.”
Bloomberg, which first reported the round, said Leone is joining Whop’s board. The same report said the company’s annualized run-rate revenue recently moved past $400 million, from $60 million at the start of 2025, with most revenue coming from a percentage of each transaction that operators process; Schwartz told Bloomberg the blended average fee is about 6%. Earlier investors listed by Bloomberg include Insight Partners, A*, Bain Capital Ventures and Peter Thiel. The company, founded in 2021, was started by three founders who met as teenagers while building sneaker-release tracking software; it employs about 110 people.
The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, has an office in New York, and plans to open offices in Colombia and in Europe, per Bloomberg. It is taking on staff across engineering, product, sales and operations.