Much like Amazon, Airbnb, and countless other startup origin stories, Whatnot began in a modest rental home. However, its founding chapter stands apart for one co-founder's unconventional approach to productivity: complete isolation.

Co-founder Logan Head "locked himself in his room for about four or five weeks to build it," Whatnot CEO Grant LaFontaine told Fortune's Allie Garfinkle during a recent episode of the Term Sheet vodcast. "He was coding 16 hours a day, six days a week."

Driven by their personal passion for collecting, LaFontaine and Head launched their livestream shopping app in December 2019. Three months later, they applied to Paul Graham's Y Combinator for the program's winter cohort. Whatnot has since grown into the largest livestream shopping platform outside of Asia, featuring an interactive format in which sellers present items via livestream while customers bid and ask questions in real time.

But before becoming America's largest livestream shopping app, the startup faced one critical hurdle: hosting its first livestream auction.

"He came out and he's like, 'All right, I'm done. We got to test this,'" LaFontaine recalled, describing the "mentally exhausting" development sprint. "He was just really nervous that it wasn't going to work."

The duo had accumulated hundreds of Funko Pop figurines, which they organized within the rental home. To determine which sales format would prove more effective, they listed half the figurines as static buy-it-now listings and livestreamed the other half—both features that remain on the platform today. LaFontaine served as the livestream's host, and within two and a half hours, the inventory sold out, generating $5,000 in a single evening.

"We sold every Funko Pop we had, everything that was in the office," LaFontaine said. "We had more in the house, but were so tired because it was 11 o'clock at night by that point. But we were very excited: It would have been more Funko Pops than I'd have been able to sell on eBay in a year."

The Rapid Rise of Whatnot

Launching at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Whatnot benefited from stay-at-home orders that aligned naturally with the livestream shopping model. The app has since experienced explosive growth, recently achieving a $20 billion valuation backed by Wonder Ventures, DST Global, and CapitalG—the growth equity arm of Alphabet, Google's parent company. Since October 2025, Whatnot's valuation has nearly doubled, placing it among the most valuable privately held consumer internet companies in the U.S.

To combat fraud, Whatnot requires sellers to appear on camera with their stock. While showing their face is not mandatory, sellers must physically display the products on camera. Unlike e-commerce giants such as Amazon or Craigslist, Whatnot deliberately focused on a small but passionate community of collectors—a niche-first strategy that Y Combinator, itself the accelerator behind Airbnb, Stripe, and DoorDash, has long championed for early-stage startups.

"The way you build something really great is by knowing your domain, knowing your customer," LaFontaine said. "I've been a collector since I was in fourth grade. I spent almost all of my career in consumer tech, in two-sided businesses or marketplaces."

Growing up in Maine, LaFontaine sold Pokémon cards with friends and opened an eBay store in fourth grade, expanding his small business nationwide. His first online sale—a holographic Chansey card—was enough to cement his identity as both a collector and a seller.

Securing Funding Wasn't Easy

This year alone, 20 million new users have joined Whatnot, with one in eight relying on the platform as their full-time job. Yet behind that momentum lay a series of setbacks.

The founders pitched hundreds of investors and maintained a spreadsheet logging feedback from each meeting. They stopped updating the document after reaching 100 rows, finding themselves too "demoralized" to continue tracking the rejections, LaFontaine said.

"Anything that's worth doing, you're going to have some series of ups and downs," LaFontaine said. "People will say a lot of things, and most of what people say will not be correct. You always have to know at moments in time when you're getting a bunch of negative news."

To date, the founders have raised $1 billion across nine funding rounds since 2020. The app has expanded well beyond its original collectibles niche, now spanning over 250 product categories that include rare clothing and accessory collections as well as trending toys such as Labubus.

Bringing the Chinese Live Auction Trend to America

Whatnot's business model draws inspiration from the Chinese livestreamed auctions popularized on Douyin, a major Chinese competitor to TikTok. These livestreams allow customers to purchase small trinkets concealed inside plastic boxes, leveraging the elements of mystery and surprise. Live commerce in China has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry, with platforms like Alibaba's Taobao Live and Douyin generating significant sales volumes during major shopping events—far outpacing adoption rates in Western markets.

In the United States, livestream commerce is also gaining traction through TikTok Live. Combined with TikTok Shop, creators use livestreams to promote storefront products through reviews and live demonstrations. Current bestsellers include Kourtney Kardashian's Lemme vitamins, with more than 10,400 total orders, and a portable phone charger and speaker, with more than 251,000 total orders. There are an estimated 216,000 active TikTok Shops in the U.S., according to a Resourcera report from March.

EBay introduced its own livestream shopping feature in 2022, though it remains limited to select approved sellers.

Whatnot's emphasis on community distinguishes it from competitors. With more than 20 items sold every second, the platform surpassed 1 billion total orders last month, with most of that volume occurring in the preceding six months, according to LaFontaine. The platform offers a vast product range—from rare coins and sports memorabilia to appliances and furniture.

It is also helping small business owners scale. LaFontaine cited a San Diego sustainable seafood merchant who livestreams directly from his boat. During its pilot, the standout seller earned $4,000 per hour selling raw seafood. Known as E-Fish, the shop has fulfilled more than 8,000 orders since joining the platform, supported by overnight shipping to maintain product freshness.

The average seller on Whatnot earns approximately $25,000 per year, making the platform a viable side hustle, while top sellers have collectively earned over $100 million on the app.

AI and the Future of Whatnot

A growing number of shopping and e-commerce platforms are integrating AI to enhance user experience and streamline market research. Tilt, a London-based startup and Whatnot competitor, has incorporated AI to automatically list items from livestreams, enabling faster customer purchases. According to Tilt, the AI achieves roughly 90% listing accuracy, which sellers can edit and refine as needed.

Whatnot is following suit by embedding AI into its platform to simplify transactions, product research, and the overall shopping experience, LaFontaine said.

"Whatnot is inherently human," LaFontaine said. "People don't come to Whatnot to watch a robot or an AI. They come to engage with people, build community, bond over real shared interests, and that's not going away."

The company already employs AI for user research and analytics and is developing tools to give sellers access to the same data to optimize their broadcasts.

"It's going to enable thousands and thousands of businesses on Whatnot to run much more efficiently," said LaFontaine. "It's going to enable many more thousands of people to create businesses, and so I think it's an exciting time."