Commerce Becomes Community: Our Partnership with Whatnot

Off the coast of San Diego, a seafood seller goes live from the deck of his boat, and by afternoon the morning's catch is packed and on its way across the country to buyers a local distributor could not reach before. In a garage in New Jersey, a sports card dealer holds a graded 1986 Michael Jordan rookie card to the camera, and regulars bid on it real time. In a studio in Los Angeles, a makeup artist shares hard-to-find Korean beauty products, selling to buyers in every time zone. 

This is live commerce powered by Whatnot. 

It all started over six years ago, when Grant and Logan first dreamed up the idea. Once Logan finished coding the first version of the app, Grant went live to test it. In just a couple of hours, they had sold hundreds of Funko Pops and immediately knew they had landed on something special. Since then, Whatnot has expanded to hundreds of categories and now sees millions of users across 10+ countries purchase items across fashion, sports and trading cards, beauty, collectibles, sneakers, luxury handbags, vinyl, sports memorabilia, electronics, food, candy, golf, and art. 

Today, we’re excited to co-lead Whatnot's Series G and to partner with Grant, Logan, and the entire Whatnot team as they build a marketplace where live commerce can truly come to life.

For twenty years, online shopping optimized for one thing: getting you what you already know you want, faster. Convenience turned shopping into something transactional, a search box and a grid of listings stripped of the discovery, expertise, and human interaction that made commerce compelling in the first place. It also raised the barrier to selling, shutting out people who had the taste, knowledge, and inventory but none of the distribution, capital, or infrastructure to reach an audience.

We believe Whatnot has changed the equation for these would-be entrepreneurs. All you need is passion for a category, quality products, and the ability to build trust with the buyer community. Many early adopters of Whatnot have grown what was once a side gig to a full-time business, expanding into warehouses of inventory and employees running concurrent live shows. The number of sellers who have reached more than a million dollars in lifetime sales more than doubled over the past year, while the share of sellers who sell full-time on Whatnot has grown by 25%. As live commerce becomes increasingly mainstream, so does live selling as a durable business opportunity. Retailers and global brands are now following a similar path by investing in live commerce as one of the most important and fastest growing channels to reach both new and existing customers. 

The key is the infrastructure that the Whatnot team has spent several years testing, building, and scaling. For a decade, many competitors came and went as they treated live shopping as a bolt-on feature rather than a genuinely different way to buy and sell. 

Instead, Whatnot was designed around live commerce from day one, resulting in a purpose-built platform that provides sellers with everything they could need. Real-time auction mechanics, unique features like giveaways, auto-generated shipping labels, analytics dashboards, inventory and sourcing infrastructure, natively integrated support with Shopify and other platforms, buyer loyalty programs, audience building tools, and above else, a deep commitment to platform trust and safety. In addition to this, the company is investing heavily into AI-powered tools to help sellers grow and manage their businesses more easily and into the discovery engine to better personalize the experience for millions of buyers. 

Just as importantly, every part of Whatnot reinforces the next, creating a compounding flywheel. Sellers bring their own inventory and their own initial customers; buyers arrive for one seller and discover ten more. Buyers are highly retentive and come back for hard-to-find products, real deals, nostalgia, discovery, entertainment, and quality from sellers they trust. And in a dynamic that makes the marketplace unusually durable, many of these buyers become sellers themselves and vice versa.

Whatnot’s success shows in the numbers, and, in the US and other international markets, they are the dominant leader. In the first half of 2026, Whatnot has facilitated more sales than in all of 2025, and buyers have more than doubled. They recently surpassed one billion orders since launch and are now processing more than 20 orders every second. Whatnot is one of the fastest growing marketplaces we have ever seen.

While the results so far are remarkable, our conviction starts with the founders. Grant and Logan saw this market before many. They watched sellers rig up clunky set-ups on platforms never built for it and understood that the experience could be extraordinary if someone would just build the right thing. Grant had built products at consumer platforms like Google and Facebook while Logan had led product and engineering at collector marketplaces like GOAT and Flight Club. Their combined experiences created the perfect match. Between them they understood two-sided platforms and what earns a community's trust. 

But what has set them apart to us since is execution. Grant is one of the most relentless operators we have ever backed, with a deep understanding of the details across the business while holding a long-term vision for where it can go. Logan was the first technical leader of the company and now focuses on launching new ideas, categories, and markets with incredible velocity. They move quickly as if the lead is never safe, constantly shipping new products and innovating for their users. In our experience, the teams that thrive are often the most paranoid, and few teams live it as fully as this one. 

Whatnot connects people around the world through shared interests, hobbies, and collections, building new communities in the process. More than one billion orders later, we believe it is still early days. More categories, more countries, more functionality, and more formats are all coming. The combination of category creation, global reach, and world-class execution can position Whatnot to become one of the defining commerce platforms of the coming decade, with more of the world's sellers - from an individual card collector to a global brand - still to bring online. We could not be more excited to welcome Grant, Logan, and the entire Whatnot team to the ICONIQ community as they scale live commerce to a global phenomenon.