Whatnot Joins the Livestream Shopping Craze with $20M Boost
Francesca Billington is a freelance reporter. Prior to that, she was a general assignment reporter for dot.LA and has also reported for KCRW, the Santa Monica Daily Press and local publications in New Jersey. She graduated from Princeton in 2019 with a degree in anthropology.
The livestream shopping craze continues.
Los Angeles-based Whatnot, an ecommerce app for collectibles and card games, has raised a $20 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz's Connie Chan.
Whatnot's platform — like other livestream apps on the market — allows sellers to demo products and make sales online. The company specializes in collectibles like Pokemon cards and Funko Pops, and uses real-time video to "capture the excitement of the in-person collector experience," Whatnot said in a press release.
The 15-person team will use the boost to hire and expand sales to categories like comic books and vintage video games.
The L.A. startup was founded in 2019 by Logan Head and Grant Lafontaine, former product managers at Facebook and GOAT who grew up buying collectibles from eBay and Yahoo Auctions.
Thursday's news comes just three months after Whatnot landed $4 million in seed funding. Though the company would not provide exact figures, it boasts tens of thousands of buyers and thousands of sellers, some of whom are "on track to make over six figures on the app."
In a blog post announcing the investment, Chan described the booming market of livestream shopping or "shopatainment" as a "a group treasure hunt where the hosts curate items and create a lively environment that makes shopping fun again."
"U.S. companies have been chipping away at building these experiences, but if China tells us anything, it's that the live shopping market is big enough for multiple platforms, niches, and standouts," said the general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
Steve Aoki, Y Combinator, Wonder Ventures, Operator Partners, Scribble Ventures and Visionary Music Group's Chris Zarou also participated in the round.
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Francesca Billington is a freelance reporter. Prior to that, she was a general assignment reporter for dot.LA and has also reported for KCRW, the Santa Monica Daily Press and local publications in New Jersey. She graduated from Princeton in 2019 with a degree in anthropology.
