Whop raises $205M led by Sequoia with Shopify Ventures — CEO says AI business training is now its fastest-growing category

Whop raises $205M, with Doug Leone joining the board

Whop has raised just over $205 million, led by Sequoia Capital with Shopify Ventures participating. Doug Leone joins the board. The round was not a straightforward win — Leone initially passed, telling the team Sequoia had already reviewed the deal and had too many concerns about market detractors. The introduction came through Justin Matine, and Schwartz says what turned it around was convincing Leone that Whop serves one of the largest markets in the world, and one of the last likely to be commoditized by AI.

Shopify partnership

Schwartz frames Shopify as far more than a capital partner. Both companies run on Ruby on Rails, and Schwartz sees a philosophical alignment around small business — Shopify has demonstrated that businesses starting small can scale to billions in revenue (Gymshark, Skims). Schwartz's view is that the world still underestimates how many small businesses will exist in the future, and that billions of businesses transacting monthly is a realistic ceiling, not an abstraction.

“A little over 205,000,000... The fastest growing category right now is actually AI business training for small businesses. They'll go in to different businesses and help teach how to do automations, how to get the best AI stack — and that is in incredibly high demand. Businesses on our platform, they grow an average of 300% after the first year.”

What's growing on the platform

When Whop launched, it was narrowly focused on sneaker bots. The platform now spans home services (plumbing, roofing, pool cleaning, kitchen renovation), emergency tree removal in Canada, fraternity and sorority communities, backyard greenhouse sales, trucking Bill Pay and AR/AP tools, and UGC marketplaces. Schwartz says the fastest-growing category right now is AI business training — operators going into small businesses to teach automation workflows and AI tool selection.

The platform sees 10,000 new business creators per day, with many more tens of thousands signing up as buyers. Businesses on the platform grow an average of 300% after their first year.

The platform model

Whop's pitch is that it gives a solo operator the same advertising infrastructure a company like Nike uses — applied to a car cleaner in Kansas making $150 a week. The core services are payments and advertising, wrapped into a dashboard that tells business owners what to do next based on where they are in their journey. Schwartz describes the product as proactive guidance: if Halloween is approaching, Whop surfaces that as a moment to run a promotion or launch ads.

The company has stablecoin infrastructure in place for cross-border transactions, and Schwartz says distribution through neobanks and consumer finance apps is a future opportunity — but not the current focus given the volume of customers already on platform.

Leone's initial reluctance, and the Shopify strategic angle, both point to the same underlying bet: that the addressable market for Whop's model is orders of magnitude larger than its current footprint, and that most of it hasn't been organized yet.