Investing in Whop to Power The Next Generation of Internet Entrepreneurs

Investing in Whop to Power The Next Generation of Internet Entrepreneurs

Whop has raised a Series D led by Sequoia and Shopify Ventures at a $5 billion valuation, with Doug Leone joining the board. When we led an early round in 2023, Whop was building for a category that was only beginning to take shape.

Its customers were a new class of internet entrepreneur: people building businesses around software, knowledge, access, and community. Many came from corners of the internet that most investors still considered fringe. We saw those communities as an early signal of a broader change in how people would build businesses and earn online.

Steven Schwartz and Cameron Zoub understood this world because they had grown up in it. They started out building and selling sneaker bots, experiencing firsthand the difficulty of getting paid, managing customers, and running a community with tools built for a different kind of business. Whop grew out of that experience. The company built payments, storefronts, customer management, and distribution around the way these entrepreneurs actually worked. 

By 2023, the business was already showing how substantial the market could become. The average merchant was generating roughly $5,000 in monthly sales and retention was strong. These were real businesses with real customers and growing economic weight. Whop was building the infrastructure behind them. The market has moved quickly since then.

More people are building meaningful incomes outside traditional employment. Upwork estimates that 38% of skilled U.S. knowledge workers freelance in 2026, up from 28% a year earlier. In 2025, 5.6 million Americans earned more than $100,000 through independent work.

AI is making it easier for individuals and small teams to turn ideas into products and services. Building software is faster. Starting a business requires less capital and fewer people. The number of people capable of becoming entrepreneurs is expanding.

That matters for Whop. Every new business still needs a way to reach customers, get paid, manage relationships, and operate. Whop gives internet entrepreneurs that infrastructure in one place, with payments and distribution spanning countries and an expanding range of products and services.

The scale of the company today reflects how quickly the category has developed. When we invested, Whop was generating roughly $8 million in annualized revenue. Today, it is north of $400 million.

Steven and Cameron want Whop to give anyone on the planet the tools to earn a sustainable income online. The opportunity has grown considerably since we first partnered with them, but the underlying idea remains the same: more people will build businesses on the internet and they need infrastructure designed for the way they work.