💰 @Whatnot raises $545M in a Series G round at a $20B valuation, led by @ICONIQCapital, @lightspeedvp, and Avra. New investors: @kleinerperkins, Wellington Management, @RobinhoodApp Ventures Fund I, S32, Standard Capital. Also joined by @capitalg, @ycombinator, Durable Capital Partners, Alkeon, @a16z, @Greycroft, @bondcap, @dstglobal. #Whatnot# is a live shopping marketplace where sellers run live video auctions across 250+ categories. 👉 #LiveCommerce# #Funding# #SeriesG#

Live commerce doesn’t stop when the stream ends. At #ApsaraConference2026#, Kubo Akinori, Managing Director, Global E-Commerce at @AnyMindGroup, showed how AI is making live commerce more continuous and data-driven, helping brands learn and improve from every interaction. He also shared how AnyMind is working with Alibaba Cloud on the next phase of AI-powered live commerce. Explore more: #AgenticEra# #AgentNative# #AIAgentsAtApsara# #BringYourAgent# #AlibabaCloud#

In third grade, Grant LaFontaine sold a Pokemon card online. The buyer mailed a money order; Grant cashed it at the post office and then shipped the card to the customer. Today he's co-founder and CEO of @Whatnot, where the largest businesses do over $100 million a year at up to 40% margins. Grant joins a16z's David George to discuss how that first transaction became a platform that did $8 billion in sales last year, why live commerce is a third of all commerce in China yet still emerging in the US, and how Whatnot operates reliably at scale, and more. 00:00 Intro 01:05 The Pokemon card and the money order 06:25 Half a Bitcoin for a domain 09:20 Why not knowing the market was an advantage 11:05 Customers don't care about your market 12:45 Most people don't buy anything 17:15 Why the eBay comparison misses 20:05 95 minutes a day on a shopping app 25:00 Sellers doing $100M with 40% margins 26:35 Fresh fish from the San Diego dock 32:25 Running a police force for two New York Cities 37:00 Why Whatnot won't do AI avatars 40:15 Cars on Whatnot @GrantLaFontaine @DavidGeorge83

Growing up in China, then moving to the States, I get asked about Superapps constantly by international friends. It sounds grand and obvious. My answer is always the same: it's not that easy! Every superapp starts as one genuinely indispensable app. Let’s use WeChat as an example: 2011: Messaging (core chat) 2012: Moments (social timeline) 2013: WeChat Pay (payments) 2014: Red Packets (红包), arguably the single most important product moment in WeChat's history. Launched during Chinese New Year, it went viral overnight and onboarded hundreds of millions of users onto WeChat Pay in weeks. Tencent later called it a "Pearl Harbor attack" on Alibaba's Alipay dominance. 2015: WeChat Pay expanded into offline retail broadly. 2016: Enterprise WeChat 2017: Mini Programs, which allowed third-party apps to run natively inside WeChat without users downloading anything. 2020: Channels (short video, direct response to Douyin/TikTok's dominance.) 2022+: Deeper Channels integration, live commerce, search ambitions It's the heaviest app on my phone and i'm forever grateful that it exists so i can send silly photos to my parents when I was roaming around the world. Never forget that building the initial core product sets the foundation for everything that comes after