Y Combinator Continuity Fund
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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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RevenueCat raises $40M Series B for its in-app subscription platform
RevenueCat, a startup offering a series of tools for developers of subscription-based apps, has raised $40 million in Series B funding, valuing its business at $300 million, post-money. Founded by developers who understood the difficulties in scaling a subscription app firsthand, RevenueCat’s software development kit (SDK) solution gives companies the tools they need to build a subscription business, including not just adding subscriptions themselves, but maintaining them over time even as the app stores implement changes. It also aids by sharing subscription data with other tools the business uses, like those for advertising, analytics or attribution.
The funding round was led by Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund and included participation from Index Ventures, SaaStr, Oakhouse, Adjacent and FundersClub, as well as Blinklist CTO Tobias Balling and Algolia CEO Nicolas Dessaigne. With the round, YC Continuity Partner Anu Hariharan is joining RevenueCat’s board, which today includes Index’s Mark Fiorentino in addition to the founders.
Explains RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting, the idea for the company came about after he and co-founder Miguel Carranza Guisado (CTO) struggled to figure out subscription infrastructure while working together at Elevate. After years of untangling a “subscription mess” in order to figure out answers to basic questions like subscriber retention and lifetime value, they realized there was potential in helping solve this problem for other developers.
Apple and Google, Eiting explains, aren’t always up to date with what companies actually need to build subscription businesses. “They’re kind of learning as they go. They just weren’t able to provide us the data we needed, and then also the infrastructure to do that is non-trivial.”
Image Credits: RevenueCat
When Eiting and Guisado sat down to work on RevenueCat in 2017, no one else was even building anything like this. But the demand for the startup’s tools and integrations soon resonated with developers who had faced similar challenges in the growing subsection app market.
Using the service, developers can access a real-time dashboard that display key metrics, like subscription revenue, churn, LTV (lifetime value), subscriber numbers, conversions and more. The data can then be shared through integrations with other tools and services, like Adjust, Amplitude, Apple Search Ads, AppsFlyer, Branch, Facebook Ads, Google Cloud Intercom, Mixpanel, Segment and several others.
After launching out of Y Combinator’s accelerator the following year, RevenueCat was soon live with 100 apps and had crossed $1 million in tracked revenue by the time it raised its $1.5 million seed round.
Today, RevenueCat has more than 6,000 apps live on its platform, with over $1 billion in tracked subscription revenue being managed by its tools. That’s double the number of apps that were using its service as of its $15 million Series A last August.
With the additional funding, the company will lower its pricing to put its tools in reach of more developers. Previously, it charged $120 per month for its charts and some of its integrations, or $499 per month for access to all integrations. This was affordable for larger companies, but could still be a difficult sell to the long tail of app developers where revenues ranged from $10K to $50K per month.
Now, RevenueCat will charge a small percentage of an app’s sales instead of a flat fee. Developers with up to $10,000 in monthly tracked revenue (MTR) can get started with the service for free and as their demands grow — like needing access to charts, support for web hooks, integrations and others — they can move up to either the Starter or Pro plans as $8/mo or $12/mo per $1,000 in MTR, respectively.
“I’m excited to give those tools to developers, especially on the small end, because it might be what they need to get out of that ‘less than $10K range,’ ” Eiting says. “Also, the beauty of freemium, or having a really generous free tier, is that it makes your tool the de facto — you remove as much friction as possible for providing software services and then, if you get your pricing right — which I think we have — it all kind of pays for itself,” he adds.
The company also plans to use the new funds to further invest in its business, expanding from App Store and Google Play support to include Amazon’s Appstore. It will also grow its team.
As part of its expected growth, RevenueCat recently hired a head of Product, Jens-Fabian Goetzmann, previously a PM at Microsoft and then product head at fitness app 8fit. Currently 30 people, in the year ahead, RevenueCat will grow to 60 people, hiring across design, product, engineering, sales and other roles.
“The world is moving toward subscriptions — and for companies, building out this model translates to weeks of developers’ time,” says YC Continuity’s Hariharan. “RevenueCat helps developers roll out subscriptions in minutes and creates a source of truth for customer data. With developers creating solutions to problems in the world, it’s important that they can find ways to monetize, grow, and support their most committed customers. RevenueCat is doing so by building subscriptions 2.0.”
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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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PlateIQ cooks up $4 million for restaurant management platform
As any fan of Kitchen Nightmares may know, the restaurant business is not for the faint of heart, nor is it likely to generate fat margins. Now, a startup called PlateIQ has raised $4 million in new funding to help restaurants automate accounts payable, and nail all their other accounting work so they can focus, finally, on the food and front-of-house. Eileses Capital led the round… Read More
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