Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Investors are betting there is serious money in helping influencers make serious money.
ShopMy, which runs a platform that helps creators monetise their followings with affiliate links, brand sponsorships and other opportunities, said Wednesday it raised $70 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. Led by investment management firm Avenir with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures, the round also attracted several high-profile investors, including influencers Sofia Richie Grainge and Aimee Song; Raissa Gerona, the chief brand officer at Revolve and Beautycounter founder Gregg Renfrew.
This was ShopMy’s third funding round in under two years. Most recently, it raised $77.5 million at a $410 million valuation in January. The company has grown rapidly since its founding in 2020. Revenue increased by 200 percent in the past year, and it reached profitability in 2024, emerging as the biggest challenger to LTK, which a decade earlier helped pioneer many of the monetisation strategies used by influencers today. LTK was valued at $2 billion in 2021 after an investment from SoftBank.
ShopMy co-founder and chief executive Harry Rein told The Business of Fashion that the company’s unicorn status is “validation that how people shop has fundamentally changed.”
ADVERTISEMENT
“Our investors see the same opportunity we do, that authentic recommendations will replace advertising as the primary way premium brands grow,” he wrote in an email. “For our team, it’s proof that betting on human curation and taste was the right call, and that the future of shopping will be built around trust, not algorithms.”
ShopMy will use the funding to build out its engineering and product teams, with an eye towards increasing the company’s capabilities in machine learning and personalisation. It also wants to create more tools for brands to measure and scale creator partnerships, as well as offerings for influencers that will help them make more money without having to make more content.
“Being well capitalised lets us take big bets at the right moments,” Rein said.
At their heart, ShopMy, LTK and their rivals are providing a similar service: providing influencers with affiliate links that give them a cut of the sale when a follower buys a product they recommended. The other main revenue stream is arranging paid partnerships with brands.
However, each platform’s approach varies. Like LTK, ShopMy also began as an affiliate marketing platform. But from the get-go, it offered brands data showing which creators were driving the most web traffic and sales, information LTK shared in a more limited capacity. ShopMy focused on gifting, with “Lookbooks,” where creators can field offers for free products. It’s also made the leap into e-commerce, introducing influencer storefronts and “Circles,” which allows shoppers to follow curated groups of curators.
That approach has helped ShopMy win over creators from rivals; it now counts over 185,000 in its network, including Karlie Kloss and Meghan Markle. In the past year, LTK has rolled out more features centred on gifting and data similar to those that have become so popular for ShopMy.
“Within just a few minutes, you can see sales driven from specific creators, down to the SKU,” said Mary Orton, a longtime content creator and the founder of the hat brand Chord, which uses ShopMy as its exclusive affiliate marketing partner. “Really understanding who is sending business your way is so huge.”
Next up is an app, set to land early in November. Unlike LTK, which has focused on building its app to be a content destination like Instagram, ShopMy wants to be a retail hub that creators link to on platforms like Instagram or TikTok. ShopMy co-founder and president Tiffany Lopinsky said that internally, they call ShopMy the “content-free social shopping app.”
ADVERTISEMENT
More companies are hoping to nab their own piece of the pie. Just last month, Condé Nast announced plans for Vette, a creator e-commerce shop platform set to launch next year, while Sephora rolled out its own influence-curated storefronts.
“The more companies that build toward this future, the better,” said Lopinsky. “The world is finally catching up to where consumers already are. When other players invest in educating the market, it validates the category and ultimately lifts the leader.”
