Whatnot
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Whatnot raises another $150M for its livestream shopping platform, evolves into a unicorn
Whatnot, a livestreaming shopping platform for collectors to buy and sell things like rare Pokémon cards and Funko Pops, has closed a $150 million Series C — its third round of fundraising in 2021 alone. This round pins Whatnot’s valuation at $1.5 billion, earning it a spot on the ever-growing list of unicorns.
So what’s a Whatnot? The app captures a trend that had been growing popular on platforms like Instagram in the U.S. (and was already hugely popular in China): live shopping. Verified sellers can go on the air at any time, hosting on-the-fly video auctions for their goods. Sometimes buyers know exactly what they’re getting. Other times it’s more of a mystery bag; with the popular “card break” concept, for example, users buy assigned portions of an unopened (and often itself rare) box of Pokémon or sports cards and watch its contents revealed live.
This round was funded by return investors a16z and Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund, along with one new firm joining them: CapitalG (which was known as Google Capital before the Google/Alphabet name change.) They’ve also added a few well-known names to their list of angel investors, including Andre Iguodala of the Golden State Warriors, Zion Williamson of the New Orleans Pelicans and Logan Paul of the YouTube. Initial word of this round broke last week, via The Information.
Whatnot originally started as a more standard (less live) resale platform, at first focused on authenticating just one kind of collectable: Funko Pops. As the pandemic took over and everyone was suddenly stuck at home, they leaned hard into live shopping — and grew rapidly as a result.
Meanwhile, the company has been quickly expanding its scope; it grew from just Funko Pops to all sorts of other collectables, including Pokémon cards, pins, vintage clothing, sneakers and more. Whatnot co-founder Grant Lafontaine tells me that its biggest driver is sports cards, followed by Pokémon and Funko Pops. With each category it dives into, Whatnot focuses on onboarding sellers that are already known and trusted in their respective community; each streamer on the platform is currently vetted by the company before they can go live, helping them keep fraud to a minimum. Doing anything sketchy just means getting booted off the platform and burning your own reputation in the process.
A few other key bits from my conversation with Lafontaine:
- He sees “thousands” of potential categories they can expand into. One they’re working on right now: NFTs. Streamers would be able to import their NFTs into Whatnot, displaying them on screen and bringing them in as (static or animated) overlays in the livestream. Users could tap an onscreen NFT to reveal its metadata and learn more about it.
- He says there are “a couple thousand active livestream sellers” on the platform right now.
- The company’s GMV (the total value of everything sold on the platform) is up 30x since its Series A back in the beginning of this year. Whatnot takes an 8% cut on each sale.
- They’re in the middle of rolling out a “pre-bidding” feature, which will allow users to bid on items they know they want ahead of a livestream — if, for example, the user knows they want a certain thing and want a shot at it, but won’t be able to watch live. Others could still out-bid them, of course.
- The company is soon rolling out a complete rebuild of both its iOS and Android apps, with a new UI meant to make the entire process smoother and easier for both buyers and sellers. Lafontaine expects it to ship to everyone in “the next week or two.”
This round brings the company’s total funds raised to $225 million — pretty much all of that in the last year. Meanwhile, competition in the space is heating up; competitors like Popshop have been raising millions for their platforms, and Miami’s Loupe raised $12 million back in June (and is opening a physical retail space soon) with its focus laser-locked on sports cards live sales. Existing giants want in on it too: YouTube is playing with the live shopping concept, and Amazon has been bringing in influencers to host live sessions. In other words: watch this space. Maybe watch it via livestream.
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Whatnot raises $50M to let people sell Pokémon cards, Funko Pops and more via livestream
Whatnot exists with one primary goal in mind: to give people a place to buy and sell collectibles (like Pokémon cards, sports cards, pins, etc.) in a safe, authenticated way.
The company started out with intentions of being a GOAT/StockX-style resale marketplace, where the products up for sale lived on neat little pages with row after row of static images. As they started experimenting with other formats, they found one that really seemed to catch on: livestream sales. Think QVC or the Home Shopping Network… but instead of hosts in huge studios selling jewelry and patio furniture, it’s users with smartphones selling Charizard cards and Yoda figurines.
Image Credits: Whatnot
I first wrote about Whatnot last year. In the short time since, the company has raised three increasingly large rounds: $4 million in December, $20 million in March and, as of this morning, another $50 million.
While Whatnot still offers the more standard product pages to give sellers a 24/7 presence on the site, the livestreaming side of things has become the primary driver — by far. Co-founder Grant LaFontaine tells me that livestreaming is currently “95% of the focus”; it’s where most of their sales are happening, and what users seem to care most about.
Another thing users seem to care about? Sports cards. Whatnot opened up the site to sports card sellers in January, and it almost immediately took over as the site’s best-selling category. The one category now accounts for “millions of dollars” in sales each month, the company says.
The Whatnot team itself is growing quickly as well. When I first spoke to them, it was just a handful of employees; by January of this year, they were up to 10. Today it’s 45 full-timers. By the end of the year, says Grant, they expect to be nearing 100.
While anyone can sell on Whatnot’s marketplace, only users that have been vetted/invited can sell via livestream. This helps to keep fraud low; sellers know that if they try to sneak in fake cards or rip anyone off, their access to livestreaming — and thus their audience — could vanish.
The company tells me that this Series B round was led by Anu Hariharan of Y Combinator Continuity fund, and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Animal Capital and a number of angels.
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Whatnot wants to be the GOAT of collectible toys, starting with Funko Pops
Funko Pops. You’ve probably noticed them at your local GameStop, Hot Topic or spread out all over your co-worker’s desk. These lil’ vinyl figurines and their big ol’ heads have taken over retail shelves in the last few years. You can now find a Funko Pop! (or thirty) for just about every fandom; there are more than 8,000 different Pops, and that number never seems to stop growing.
Like most collectible things, some Pops are worth more than others — whether they’re obscure characters that didn’t get a big run, limited-edition color variations or were only sold for a day or two at a convention, the rarest Pops can sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars. And, like anything where people are dropping piles of cash, there are folks trying to sell fakes.
Whatnot, a company out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 class, wants to tackle the issue of fakes in collectibles by adapting a model proven by services like GOAT and StockX: authenticated resale.
As with the aforementioned, Whatnot works as the obsessively-informed middle man between buyer and seller. Buyer makes an offer, seller sends their figurine to Whatnot, Whatnot uses its growing knowledge of what’s real (and how to flag what’s not) to make sure it’s legit. If everything looks good, Whatnot forwards the Funko Pop to the buyer and takes their cut (about 9%, plus a few bucks for shipping).
“We started out buying and reselling sneakers, actually,” Whatnot co-founder Grant LaFontaine tells me. “Then we started getting into buying/reselling Funko Pops. As we started to do this, we noticed it was much more difficult, and much more unsafe, to buy and sell Funko Pops than it was to buy and sell sneakers.”
Services like GOAT and StockX had “drastically simplified” the process for sneaker fans, LaFontaine says, helping to weed out counterfeits for buyers while limiting potential scams that could hurt sellers.
Today all sales on Whatnot are verified by a human expert. That makes sense for the rarer, more expensive figurines. The “Grails,” as Funko Pop collectors call them — like this Comic Con Sith Trooper that has been selling for around $600-700, or this 2012 “Holographic” Darth Maul that can go for thousands. For the less rare stuff, though, it’s a bit overkill.
With that in mind, Whatnot is building out its database of the red flags to look for with each transaction — things like boxes that are just slightly mis-sized, or a logo that doesn’t look quite right. In time, this could allow for more of their verification to be automated, with the human expert (and the associated higher fees) reserved for bigger transactions.
Whatnot isn’t alone in noticing this market’s potential. StockX, the authenticated resale marketplace that first focused on sneakers, expanded into collectibles late last year. Whatnot is looking to find its fan base by focusing solely on collectibles, giving collectors the exact user experience, filters and info they’d be looking for within a given category.
That’s not to say they’re focusing solely on Funko Pops, though — not in the long run, at least. The team intends to expand into other types of collectibles down the road, with Pokémon cards being the likely next candidate.
Whatnot tells me it has raised a $550,000 pre-seed round from Wonder Ventures, YC, and a handful of angel investors.
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