红杉资本领投数字商业平台 Whop D 轮融资，年化营收达 5 亿美元

Two years ago, Whop co-founders Steven Schwartz and Cameron Zoub noticed online creators were cutting short clips of other people’s videos, posting them, and getting paid for driving views. To most of the internet, it was a fad. Steven and Cameron understood immediately why it worked and built a Whop program around it. They saw in that moment, and continue to see today, what people are about to want.

From user-generated content and vibe coding to pet products and lawn care services, AI is driving an enormous wave of entrepreneurial energy online. The traditional path of getting a degree and climbing the corporate ladder looks less reliable than it once did—even if you believe, as we do, that job creation will outpace job loss. At the same time, the barriers and costs of starting a business are quickly coming down.

This new generation of entrepreneurs are betting on themselves, and Whop is where they go to do it.

Entrepreneurship is not easy, yet tens of thousands of people are earning real money on Whop’s platform. That is because Steven, Cameron and their team understand not only how people are making money online, but how to make it easier. Instead of cobbling together solutions for payments and financial management, delivering goods or services, and marketing your business, you get everything in one place with Whop. Whether you already have a business, want to start one, or want to work, the Whop team has built a seamless experience that gets you up and running in minutes.

We have known Steven and Cameron for years, and they are unbelievably talented. They grew up in the online economy, writing scrappy software and reselling sneakers online when they were still teenagers in Chicago. Like them, the Whop team is high energy and high velocity, and, despite staying very lean, is constantly shipping features, including a new AI-powered decision engine that uses the platform’s robust transaction data to help businesses maximize their profits. From the start, our conversations have focused on what their business needs and how we can help. We are proud to join Whop’s board and lead its Series D. Participating alongside Sequoia is Shopify Ventures, and we expect to learn a great deal from Shopify, a thriving company that pioneered modern entrepreneurship.

Whop’s metrics are nothing short of spectacular. Already at half a billion dollars in run-rate revenue, the company is still accelerating. Each day, 10,000 new businesses are created on the platform, including those started by students at major universities such as Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton and Columbia, where Whop is part of the curriculum. And these are not fly-by-night companies. The fastest-growing types are all categories you would recognize: real products and services, with real customers, and extremely low churn.

For the next generation of online businesses, and anyone who has an entrepreneurial spirit and wants to apply their creativity, Whop is the place to be.