Investors are betting there’s serious money in helping influencers make serious money.
ShopMy, which runs a platform that allows creators to monetize their followers with affiliate links, brand sponsorships and other opportunities, said Wednesday it has 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 less than 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. Sales increased by 200 percent in the past year and it became profitable in 2024. That made it the biggest challenger to LTK, which a decade earlier helped pioneer many of the monetization strategies used by influencers today. LTK was valued at $2 billion in 2021 after an investment from SoftBank.
ShopMy co-founder and CEO Harry Rein shared The fashion world that the company’s unicorn status is “a confirmation that the way people shop has fundamentally changed.”
“Our investors see the same opportunity as we do, which is that authentic recommendations will replace advertising as the primary way premium brands grow,” he wrote in an email. “To our team, this is proof that betting on human taste and taste was the right decision, 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 to expanding the company’s capabilities in machine learning and personalization. It also wants to create more tools to help brands measure and scale creator partnerships, as well as offers for influencers to help them make more money without having to create more content.
“By being well capitalized, we can make big bets at the right times,” says Rein.
At their heart, ShopMy, LTK and their rivals offer a similar service: providing influencers with affiliate links that give them a cut of sales when a follower buys a product they recommend. The other major revenue stream is establishing paid partnerships with brands.
However, each platform’s approach varies. Like LTK, ShopMy also started as an affiliate marketing platform. But from the start, it provided brand data showing which creators were generating the most web traffic and revenue, information that LTK shared in a more limited capacity. ShopMy focused on gifts, with ‘Lookbooks’, where creators can post offers for free products. It has also made the leap into e-commerce, introducing influencer storefronts and ‘Circles’, which allow shoppers to follow curated groups of curators.
That approach has allowed ShopMy to win over rival makers; it now has more than 185,000 in its network, including Karlie Kloss and Meghan Markle. Over the past year, LTK has introduced more features focused on gifts and data, similar to the features that have become so popular for ShopMy.
“In just a few minutes, you can see sales driven by specific creators, down to the SKU,” says Mary Orton, longtime content creator and founder of hat brand Chord, which uses ShopMy as its exclusive affiliate marketing partner. “It is extremely important to really understand who is sending business your way.”
Next up is an app, which will be released early next year. Unlike LTK, which has focused on building its app as a content destination like Instagram, ShopMy aims to be a shopping hub that creators link to on platforms like Instagram or TikTok. ShopMy co-founder and president Tiffany Lopinsky said they internally call ShopMy the “content-free social shopping app.”
More and more companies are hoping to grab their own piece of the pie. Last month, Condé Nast announced plans for Vette, an e-commerce shopping platform launching next year, while Sephora rolled out its own influence-operated storefronts.
“The more companies build this future, the better,” Lopinsky said. “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 elevates the leader.”
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