What are the top startups in the social commerce market?

What counts as a social commerce startup now?

For this ranking, a social commerce startup has to turn creators, community, video or live interaction into repeatable purchases at meaningful scale.

That definition covers several businesses that look quite different from one another. Whatnot, Tilt and Palmstreet own marketplaces where discovery, interaction and checkout happen together. LTK, ShopMy and Wishlink let creators drive purchases across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and other channels while handling attribution and monetization. Firework sells the video-commerce technology directly to retailers.

We exclude TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest because the question is about startups and private scaleups. We also exclude companies that have already been acquired or shut down. Older private companies such as LTK still qualify because they remain independent and compete directly for the same creator-commerce spending.

The ranking therefore comes down to a fairly simple test: how much real commerce does each company generate, how quickly is that commerce growing, and how hard would the business be to displace?

Is social commerce actually big enough to support major startups?

Yes. U.S. social commerce is already crossing $100 billion in annual sales, so startups are competing inside a real ecommerce market rather than waiting for one to appear.

EMARKETER expects U.S. social commerce sales to exceed $100 billion in 2026, after reaching about $87 billion in 2025. The research firm also expects double-digit growth to continue for several more years.

TikTok Shop shows how quickly shopping behavior is changing. Momentum Works estimated U.S. TikTok Shop GMV at $15.1 billion in 2025, up 68% in one year. During the first half of 2026, U.S. GMV reached an estimated $11.8 billion, 103% above the same period a year earlier. Globally, TikTok Shop reached roughly $50.3 billion of GMV during those six months.

The composition is just as interesting as the growth. Momentum Works estimates that the Shop interface generated 51.4% of U.S. TikTok Shop GMV in the first half of 2026, versus 40.4% from video and only 8.2% from livestreams. Social commerce now covers a much wider behavior than watching someone sell products live. Social content starts the shopping journey, while the actual purchase can happen through feeds, storefronts, creator links or marketplaces.

That wider definition gives startups several ways to build large businesses without trying to recreate TikTok itself.

Is Whatnot clearly the top social commerce startup right now?

Whatnot is clearly the top social commerce startup right now, and the gap has become difficult to argue with.

Whatnot generated more than $8 billion of GMV during the first half of 2026, already exceeding the roughly $8 billion it processed during all of 2025. The company compressed more than a full year of previous transaction volume into six months.

Its latest financing confirmed how far Whatnot has separated from the startup pack. The company raised $545 million in a Series G at a $20 billion valuation, almost twice the $11.5 billion valuation attached to its previous major round. Whatnot says its buyer base more than doubled over the preceding year, while more than 550,000 hours of live shows are now hosted each week.

The marketplace is also broadening. Whatnot added more than 35 categories in 2025 and another 45-plus during the first half of 2026. More recently, it acquired recommendation-technology startup Shaped and created an Applied AI Research group to improve discovery across a marketplace where products and auctions change constantly.

The comparison with TikTok Shop puts the scale into perspective. Momentum Works estimated $11.8 billion of U.S. TikTok Shop GMV during the first half of 2026. Whatnot exceeded $8 billion across its North American and European footprint during the same period. The geographic bases differ, so we should not read that as direct market share. The order of magnitude is still remarkable for an independent startup facing one of the world's largest consumer platforms.

Whatnot metric	Latest evidence
First-half 2026 GMV	More than $8B
Full-year 2025 GMV	About $8B
Latest valuation	$20B
Latest funding round	$545M
Weekly live content	550,000+ hours
Buyer growth	More than doubled YoY

If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest social commerce market report.

Is LTK still the second-biggest social commerce startup?

LTK still deserves the No. 2 spot because its creator-commerce network already drives more than $6 billion in annual retail sales.

LTK reaches more than 44 million monthly shoppers and works with more than 8,000 retailers. Its creator count varies slightly depending on how the company defines the network: recent LTK materials refer to more than 400,000 qualified creators, while Business of Fashion has put the broader global community at roughly 500,000.

Those numbers make LTK much more than an affiliate-link tool. The company supports around 60,000 creator-brand collaborations each year, and creator recommendations now sit on top of a huge product catalog spanning hundreds of millions of items.

LTK has also been changing the consumer product. It launched LTK AI, which answers shopping questions using creator content, and Quick Collabs, which lets brands offer flat-fee campaigns to creators without going through lengthy one-to-one negotiations. The idea is straightforward: LTK wants more of the relationship between shopper, creator and brand to happen inside its own ecosystem.

The main reason LTK sits behind Whatnot is pace. LTK has enormous existing distribution, but the public numbers show a mature platform growing steadily while Whatnot is currently moving through a much more aggressive expansion phase.

Is ShopMy catching LTK faster than it looks?

ShopMy is catching LTK fast enough that the No. 2 ranking could change.

ShopMy raised $70 million at a $1.5 billion valuation after reporting more than $1 billion in annual platform sales, 200% year-over-year revenue growth and sustained profitability since 2024. At that point, the company had about 185,000 creators.

The latest numbers are already larger. The Financial Times recently reported more than 243,000 creators and over $200 million of monthly purchases across fashion, jewelry and homeware. Maintaining that monthly level for a full year would put ShopMy above $2.4 billion in transaction volume.

That run rate would equal roughly 40% of LTK's $6 billion annual sales figure. ShopMy would still be meaningfully smaller, but the difference starts to look much less comfortable than the companies' histories suggest. Its creator count has also risen by roughly one-third from the 185,000 disclosed around its funding round to the 243,000 reported more recently.

ShopMy has an additional advantage in its economic model. Its own creator documentation says the company generally keeps 18% of affiliate commissions under its standard revenue-sharing structure, while some transactions generate separate fees from brands. The company therefore participates directly in the commerce it measures.

Metric	LTK	ShopMy
Annual commerce volume	$6B+	$200M+ monthly recently
Monthly shoppers	44M+	Undisclosed
Creator network	400K+ qualified	243K+
Retailer / brand network	8,000+ retailers	1,600+ brands recently reported
Latest disclosed valuation	$2B in 2021	$1.5B

If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest social commerce market report.

Do Later and Mavely belong in the same social commerce tier?

Later and Mavely belong close to the leaders by transaction volume, although the combined company increasingly looks like enterprise creator infrastructure.

Later acquired Mavely for $250 million and has since pushed the combined platform above a $2.4 billion annual GMV run rate. Later says that figure increased by more than $1 billion from 2024, implying growth of roughly 70% from the previous base.

Mavely now has more than 180,000 creators, and their GMV grew by more than 100% year over year. Later also works with more than 3,000 brands and retailers.

Holiday shopping provided a useful stress test. During the four days around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, creator content across the platform generated more than $50 million of sales, while Mavely creators earned about $3 million.

Later's position is substantial, especially with large brands that want creator discovery, campaign management, affiliate attribution and measurement in one system. We rank it below LTK and ShopMy because consumer shopping is less central to Later's identity. The company increasingly resembles the enterprise operating system behind creator commerce.

Is Wishlink already India’s strongest creator-commerce startup?

Wishlink is the strongest young creator-commerce startup in India we found, with unusually large transaction volume for the amount of capital it has raised.

When Wishlink announced its $17.5 million Series B in early 2026, the company reported more than 40,000 monthly active creators producing over 300,000 pieces of content each month. Those creators were driving more than six million orders and over ₹350 crore of monthly sales.

Wishlink's current brand website now claims more than 100,000 active creators per month and over 500,000 monthly pieces of content, while still displaying more than ₹350 crore of monthly GMV. If those definitions are consistent, the creator base has grown about 2.5 times while monthly GMV has yet to show a comparable increase publicly. That is worth watching because supply may currently be growing ahead of transaction productivity.

The financial trajectory is stronger. Wishlink's operating revenue jumped 356% in FY2025, from ₹11.79 crore to ₹53.8 crore. Its loss barely moved, from ₹18.22 crore to ₹18.79 crore. Revenue therefore increased more than fourfold while the absolute loss stayed roughly flat.

For a company founded in 2022 with around $27.5 million of disclosed funding, ₹350 crore of monthly GMV is already meaningful scale. Wishlink still has a long way to go before reaching LTK or ShopMy globally, but it has become one of the most credible regional challengers in social commerce.

Can Tilt become Europe’s version of Whatnot?

Tilt is Europe's strongest young live-commerce challenger, especially once we look at how often its buyers return.

Tilt raised $26 million in 2026, taking total funding beyond $50 million after reporting eightfold growth since its 2024 Series A. Buyers spend more than an hour per day on the app, 70% return from one week to the next and repeat buyers generate 70% of monthly GMV, according to the company.

Those retention figures are much more useful than raw downloads. They show that live shopping is becoming a habit for a meaningful part of Tilt's user base.

Tilt is also trying to remove one of live commerce's obvious constraints: sellers normally have to be live. Its recently launched Clips feature turns an item shown to the camera into a shoppable short video in about 2.3 seconds. Tilt says 70% of the users posting Clips had never previously hosted a livestream. That opens the marketplace to a much larger pool of casual sellers and keeps inventory available outside scheduled shows.

The company is currently active in the UK, Italy, Spain and Poland, and Vinted Ventures joined the latest round. The missing GMV figure still matters. Until Tilt publishes transaction scale, putting it next to Whatnot would be premature. Among European challengers, though, Tilt has the clearest combination of funding, retention and product momentum.

If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest social commerce market report.

Is Palmstreet still too niche to matter?

Palmstreet has moved beyond a plant-shopping curiosity and now looks like a serious U.S. niche-marketplace contender.

Palmstreet passed three million orders in 2025 and crossed 100,000 hosted livestreams in early 2026. Inc. reported more than 5,500 active sellers, with Palmstreet estimating that roughly 20% sell full time. More than 20 sellers had already generated at least $1 million of revenue on the platform.

Those numbers explain why starting with rare plants worked. Plants, collectibles, reptiles, crafts and other specialist products reward knowledgeable sellers who can answer questions live. Palmstreet could build dense communities before expanding into fashion, beauty and lifestyle categories.

Its latest seller moves are also aggressive. Palmstreet has made zero selling fees permanent for purchases from buyers whom sellers personally refer to the platform. The company also says purchases by U.S. buyers from international livestreams have increased 50-fold this year.

That strategy effectively asks sellers to bring part of their existing Instagram, Facebook or mailing-list audience onto Palmstreet while giving them a financial reason to do so. The big question now is whether the same community density survives as Palmstreet moves into broader categories where Whatnot, TikTok Shop and conventional marketplaces are much stronger.

Does Firework really belong in a social commerce startup ranking?

Firework deserves a place in the social commerce ranking as retailer infrastructure, with a very different job from Whatnot, LTK or ShopMy.

Firework lets retailers add short videos, livestreams, creator content and interactive shopping directly to their websites, apps, email and other owned channels. Its current website says more than 1,500 brands and retailers use the platform and that Firework has helped drive over $300 million of GMV.

The company has raised around $250 million, with its largest financing coming from SoftBank. Customers and case studies span grocery, beauty, fashion, electronics and consumer products.

Firework's pitch has become more relevant as retailers worry about giving TikTok, Instagram and other platforms control over customer acquisition and first-party data. A retailer can use the same video-heavy shopping interfaces while keeping the shopper on its own property.

The trade-off is defensibility. Firework has no consumer marketplace where buyers attract sellers and sellers attract buyers. Its advantage comes from software, integrations, content tooling and enterprise relationships. We therefore keep Firework in the ranking while placing it below the companies that have built their own commerce networks.

Is Jamble becoming a real live-commerce company in Brazil?

Jamble is still early, yet its Brazilian business is growing quickly enough to earn a place on the social-commerce watchlist.

The French startup made Brazil its priority market after launching local operations in late 2025. GMV climbed from roughly R$500,000 in December to R$3 million in March and around R$4 million in April. That is an eightfold increase in about five months.

Jamble also processed more than 50,000 transactions in April, up roughly 300% over five months, with more than 3,000 active buyers and 400 sellers. Pokémon trading cards alone represent more than half of Brazilian GMV, followed by categories such as die-cast collectibles, Magic: The Gathering and retro games.

The concentration in collectibles makes sense. Authentication, scarcity, bidding and seller expertise give shoppers a reason to watch and interact. Those are the same ingredients that helped Whatnot establish itself.

Jamble remains tiny beside the companies at the top of this ranking. R$4 million of monthly GMV is only early traction. The speed of the Brazilian ramp makes it worth following, especially if Jamble can reproduce the model across several collectible categories without losing that growth.

What did Flip’s shutdown expose about social commerce?

Flip's collapse is the clearest warning that social-commerce growth can look healthy long after the economics have gone wrong.

Before shutting down in 2025, Flip had reached a $1.1 billion valuation, 16.5 million users, 4.6 million participating creators and roughly $375 million of brand sales. Business Insider reported that downloads surged 855% during the uncertainty surrounding a possible U.S. TikTok ban.

That growth came with expensive incentives. Flip paid users to create reviews, offered referral rewards and used large discounts to encourage purchases. When TikTok remained available, one of Flip's biggest acquisition openings disappeared. High acquisition and retention costs became harder to hide.

The comparison with today's stronger companies is useful. Tilt can point to weekly returning buyers. ShopMy can point to sustained profitability. Wishlink's revenue grew more than fourfold while losses stayed broadly flat. Whatnot has sellers building businesses large enough to generate seven figures of lifetime sales.

Downloads and registered users can move very quickly in social commerce. Repeat transactions, healthy seller economics and a business model that survives without extraordinary incentives tell us much more.

If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest social commerce market report.

Which social commerce business model is actually winning?

The strongest social commerce model today depends on how much of the purchase relationship the company can own without making growth prohibitively expensive.

Whatnot, Tilt and Palmstreet own the marketplace. They control discovery, seller relationships, checkout and the transaction itself. If the network becomes dense enough, buyers attract sellers and sellers bring more inventory for buyers. The same model also creates large trust, support, fraud and marketplace-operations workloads.

LTK, ShopMy, Wishlink and Mavely take another route. Instagram, TikTok and YouTube can supply much of the audience, while the startup handles creator monetization, attribution, brand relationships and commerce data. These companies can grow without persuading consumers to abandon their existing social feeds.

Firework operates one layer further back by giving retailers the technology to make their own sites feel more social.

Our read is that the highest upside still belongs to owned marketplaces when they reach real liquidity, which is why Whatnot sits first. Creator-commerce infrastructure looks easier to reproduce across markets, which explains why LTK, ShopMy, Later and Wishlink can all build large businesses without one company swallowing the entire category.

Model	Companies leading it	Where the advantage comes from	Main risk
Social marketplace	Whatnot, Tilt, Palmstreet, Jamble	Buyer-seller network and owned transactions	Liquidity, trust and operating costs
Creator-commerce network	LTK, ShopMy, Wishlink	Existing social distribution plus attribution data	Dependence on external platforms
Enterprise creator platform	Later / Mavely	Brand workflows and performance data	Less consumer ownership
Video-commerce infrastructure	Firework	Retailer relationships and integrations	Easier switching than a marketplace

Are investors concentrating money around a few social commerce winners?

Investors are concentrating the biggest social-commerce checks around companies that already show real transaction scale.

Consider four recent rounds among companies in this ranking. Whatnot raised $545 million, ShopMy raised $70 million, Tilt raised $26 million and Wishlink raised $17.5 million. Together, those rounds total $658.5 million.

Whatnot alone represents about 83% of that capital.

The comparison is imperfect because the financings happened at different points and company stages, so we should treat it as a sample of major recent rounds rather than a market-wide funding total. The concentration is still hard to miss. ShopMy received a large growth round after passing $1 billion of annual platform sales and reaching profitability. Tilt raised after eightfold growth and strong repeat-purchase numbers. Wishlink raised after reaching hundreds of crores of monthly GMV.

Venture capital is available for new social-commerce ideas, although huge checks increasingly follow proof that people are already buying repeatedly.

Which social commerce metric should we trust most?

If we have to trust one metric in social commerce, repeat transaction volume beats downloads, followers, creator registrations and funding.

Social apps can manufacture an impressive top of funnel. Referral programs can push downloads. Payments can attract creators. Discounts can temporarily increase orders. Flip demonstrated how far those techniques can carry a company.

A much harder pattern to manufacture is the same buyers returning, sellers earning enough to stay, and commerce volume continuing to rise once the platform becomes larger.

That is why we give extra weight to Whatnot's accelerating marketplace volume, Tilt's repeat purchasing, ShopMy's combination of growth and profitability, and Wishlink's revenue trajectory. We also treat Wishlink's newer creator-count growth cautiously until the GMV figure moves with it. A bigger creator network is useful only when those creators keep producing incremental commerce.

For future rankings, this is where we would look first. The company whose transaction density keeps increasing has a much better claim to leadership than the company generating the loudest user-growth announcement.

If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest social commerce market report.

So which social commerce startups are actually on top today?

Whatnot is the top social commerce startup today, with LTK and ShopMy forming a clear second tier and ShopMy gaining ground the fastest.

Whatnot has already reached the transaction scale of a major ecommerce marketplace while continuing to grow unusually quickly. LTK remains the strongest mature creator-commerce network, with huge shopper distribution and retailer coverage. ShopMy is smaller today, although its recent growth gives it the best chance of changing the order near the top.

Later/Mavely comes next because creator-attributed transaction volume has reached several billion dollars annually. Wishlink ranks fifth and stands out as the strongest younger regional company, especially given how little capital it has needed relative to the commerce flowing through the platform.

Tilt and Palmstreet are the two marketplace challengers we would watch most closely. Tilt has unusually strong repeat behavior and is moving beyond scheduled livestreams. Palmstreet has built genuine seller businesses around specialist communities and is now pushing into larger categories.

Firework remains important on the infrastructure side. Jamble is earlier and too small for the core ranking today, though its Brazilian growth makes it one of the more interesting companies just outside it.

The bigger conclusion is that social commerce has split into two winning startup strategies. One group owns highly social marketplaces where community improves the actual transaction. The other group builds the pipes that turn creators' recommendations across existing social networks into measurable purchases. Whatnot currently leads the first group. LTK and ShopMy lead the second.

Rank	Company	Model	Why it ranks here
1	Whatnot	Live social marketplace	By far the strongest combination of transaction scale and current growth
2	LTK	Creator commerce	Largest mature independent creator-commerce network
3	ShopMy	Creator commerce	Fastest-moving challenger near the top
4	Later / Mavely	Creator-commerce infrastructure	Multi-billion-dollar creator-attributed commerce engine
5	Wishlink	Creator commerce	Strongest young regional challenger we found
6	Tilt	Live social marketplace	Best European challenger with unusually strong retention
7	Palmstreet	Community marketplace	Real marketplace density in specialist categories
8	Firework	Video-commerce infrastructure	Large enterprise footprint, although weaker network effects
Watch	Jamble	Live collectibles marketplace	Small today, with very fast early growth in Brazil

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