Venture firms talk up the deals they walk away from, then quietly celebrate the ones they got wrong. Whop is the second kind: Sequoia Capital turned the business down once and has now led its $205M Series D at a $5.1B post-money valuation, per Bloomberg, with Shopify’s venture arm on the ticket.
Doug Leone took over the board seat. He ran Sequoia through 2022, came back as chairman in March 2026, and this is the first bet he has signed off on since returning to day-to-day investing. What changed his mind: sellers on the platform kept expanding into new categories instead of falling away.
Three teenagers, one dashboard
Steven Schwartz, Cameron Zoub and Jack Sharkey started Whop in 2021. They had met as Chicago teenagers writing software that followed sneaker drops. The service now handles the whole stack – checkout, fulfillment, marketing – so an operator never has to bolt tools together.
The customer list is deliberately unglamorous: a Canadian firm that pulls down storm-damaged trees, someone curating music playlists, an app that brokers private jet charters. Some 25,000 operators move $550M through it monthly, backed by more than 50,000 others who help keep them running, and Sequoia counts 10,000 storefronts opening daily.
The numbers behind the markup
Whop makes money by skimming transactions. Schwartz told Bloomberg the blended rate runs 6%, with annualised revenue north of $400M. Sequoia’s own post cites roughly half a billion, so the two figures disagree; on the $400M number the price works out to about 13 times run rate.
Tether bought in at $1.6B in February, putting $200M in and plugging stablecoin payments into the product. Eight months later the company is worth three times that, a bar the next raise will have to clear – and none of the metrics have been audited.
