Whatnot is worth $11.5 billion—and its sellers just hit one billion orders

The first orders on Whatnot, in 2020, were Funko Pops, sold live by cofounder Grant La Fontaine. For the uninitiated: “A Funko Pop is a vinyl bobblehead-like doll, generally built around various IP,” La Fontaine explained in a recent interview we did for a forthcoming Term Sheet podcast. “You can get a Star Wars Funko Pop, or your favorite football players… There’s basically a Funko Pop for anything you can think of.” That very first Funko Pop-centered livestream was an experiment, and a successful one at that—with LaFontaine selling $5,000 in Funko Pops in a few hours that July 2020 evening. “We sold every Funko Pop we had, everything that was in the office,” said LaFontaine. “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.” It was the beginning of a live commerce marketplace that, six years later, is one of tech’s sneakiest runaway successes. Whatnot—which in October raised a $225 million Series F, with an $11.5 billion valuation—has been in the midst of a serious growth spurt: The startup says it saw more than 20 million new accounts created over the last year, while the number of first-time buyers on the platform has grown year-over-year by 285%. On Whatnot, a universe of sellers converges, offering everything from Star Wars merchandise, designer handbags, and fresh fish. (Yes, you read that right—@efish_co, who’s based in San Diego and livestreams while he’s fishing, sends customers fresh seafood that they watched come from the Pacific Ocean.) Now, a long way from one evening of Funko Pops, Whatnot’s sellers have crossed one billion orders, the company exclusively told Fortune. “It’s wild to comprehend, one billion orders is a lot of orders,” LaFontaine said. “The way the business is compounding today, the vast majority of those one billion orders has happened in the past six months.” Whatnot’s rise am