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👋 Welcome to the 18th edition of the Marketplace Memo. My goal is to share curated news, content, and stories about marketplaces, with a splash of my own color. Please enjoy and share with others!

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Agent Economy Vibes

About a year ago, I wrote:

"The real potential of AI in marketplaces lies not in optimizing processes but in reimagining them entirely. AI is the key to a new model in which the heavy lifting of aggregation, matching, and decision-making is no longer human-driven but agent-led." - Agent-Led Marketplaces

And I think that revolution is starting to happen. But first, let’s talk about internet lobsters. 🦞

Peter Steinberger built Clawdbot as a weekend project in November. It is an open-source software that connects an AI model to your messaging apps so you can text it tasks and it executes them (much more to it, but that is the gist). By late January, it had been renamed twice (Anthropic’s trademark lawyers had gotten involved) and reborn as OpenClaw. Then, Matt Schlicht had his agent build a social network called Moltbook, which launched on January 28th and, within days, had 1.6 million bot accounts and 7.5 million AI-generated posts (now much more). Andrej Karpathy called it “the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.” All of this in about three months, and then OpenAI “acquired” OpenClaw. Outside of the tech theater, what caught my eye was that people/agents immediately started building marketplaces, kickstarting the agent or agentic economy, as some have called it.

Three distinct models have emerged:

• A2A (Agent-to-Agent): Agents are on both the demand and supply sides. Platforms like Openlancer let agents post jobs, pitch, and pay each other, mostly via crypto.

• A2H (Agent-to-Human): Agents are the demand side, humans are the supply side. RentAHuman launched on February 2nd and has gotten some traction, pulling in 70,000 signups. Agents browse human profiles and book people at $5–$500/hour for real-world tasks.

• H2A (Human-to-Agent): Humans are the demand side, agents are the supply side. Moltverr is already live: humans post jobs, agents apply, best pitch wins.

So which model will take off? I think it is too early for A2A, and I am unsure of its current real-world use cases (maybe small micro transactions). I'm betting H2A and A2H are the two models that scale with H2A scaling first. It works like hiring already works; you have a job, you find the best candidate, except now the candidate pool includes agents that work 24/7 at a fraction of the cost. That said, Yonder portfolio company FeltSense is pushing the A2H model to its limits. Marik Hazan just raised $5.1M to build AI agents as fully autonomous founders. FeltSense has agents creating and running a business, and hiring humans as needed along the way!

We are in the early innings of the next generation of marketplaces, but I am still not sure we are there yet. OpenClaw agents are far too difficult for the vast majority of people to use and are rife with security vulnerabilities. We took a huge leap, but as with all things, the last mile of adoption is always the longest.

If you know of any cool agent-led marketplaces, please share in the comments!

While agent-led marketplaces represent the future, traditional marketplaces are thriving in the present, especially compared to their SaaS counterparts.

🔥 The Highlight

SaaS Is Getting Crushed. Marketplaces Are Not (for the most part).

AI is software on steroids, and no surprise, it's eating the world, and it largely is a net positive tailwind for marketplaces. I've been saying this for a while now, and one might even call me a perma marketplace bull, but the public markets are making the case better than I ever could, and my good friends at FJ Labs illustrated this well.

My other friends at SNAK Venture Partners dug even deeper into the data. Over the last 12 months, WCLD (the cloud SaaS ETF) is down -31.2%, with Adobe and Salesforce both off -42.5%. Meanwhile, horizontal marketplaces like eBay, Alibaba, and MercadoLibre averaged +15.1%, and asset marketplaces like Carvana were up +25.9%. An equal-weighted basket of marketplace stocks (excluding labor) outperformed WCLD by more than 30 percentage points.

In my opinion, the reason is structural. AI improves efficiency, automates workflows, and reduces headcount, which sounds great until you realize those are the exact things SaaS customers are paying for. SaaS sells a workflow (which requires people) while AI sells an outcome, which is great for marketplaces!

"Enterprise software companies charge recurring subscription fees for access to software that helps people do their jobs. If AI agents can do those jobs directly—or if foundation models make bespoke software irrelevant—the subscription fee disappears. Marketplaces, with their network effects and transaction-based revenue, are structurally harder to disrupt in this way." - Sonia Nagar of SNAK Venture Partners

For marketplaces, the economics run the other way: more efficient marketing, lower per unit costs, better matching, smarter pricing, lower CAC, etc. Every AI improvement drives efficiency at the transactional level, which, in turn, means better margins (a huge generalization, but it's directionally right).

The dividing line isn’t really marketplace vs. SaaS; it’s whether AI replaces what you sell with an actual outcome, or helps you improve what and how you sell.

I'm seeing this dynamic validated in the venture funding marketplace, too. Early-stage marketplace deals are picking up meaningfully, suggesting investors are cycling back into the category. I have been here all along, but it’s nice to see a focus on the defensibilities that marketplaces offer.

📰 News

Announcements

“Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT” - OpenAI announced plans to test ads in ChatGPT’s free and Go tiers, promising that ads will never influence answers. It is a pivotal moment for how AI-mediated commerce will work and for whether OpenAI can build an ad model fundamentally different from those that came before. OpenAI

“ChatGPT's 4% Fee Confirms Marketplace Economics” - Shopify confirmed merchants will pay OpenAI a 4% fee on ChatGPT checkout sales, bringing all-in costs to roughly 9%, still well below Amazon's 25%+, and with conversion rates nearly 9x higher than Google organic. Marketplace Pulse argues this makes ChatGPT the first organic discovery channel at scale since Amazon's ad business killed unpaid visibility. Marketplace Pulse

“Google makes Etsy and Wayfair items shoppable within agentic AI search” - Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol now lets users buy Etsy and Wayfair items without leaving Google Search or Gemini, marking a major milestone in agentic commerce, going from concept to reality and creating both opportunity and existential questions for marketplace operators. Retail Brew

“Public and Autopilot Partner to Bring a New Model of Managed Investing to Retail Investors” - Public partnered with Autopilot (creators of the viral Pelosi Stock Tracker) to offer managed investing strategies, blending the marketplace model with creator-driven finance. PR Newswire

“We launched Zumper’s app on ChatGPT today!” - Zumper became the first rentals-only app live on ChatGPT, allowing users to browse rental inventory conversationally. LinkedIn

“’Grubhub Will Eat the Fees’: George Clooney and Yorgos Lanthimos Lead the Brand’s Big Game Debut, Redefining Restaurant Delivery with New No-Fee Benefit” - Grubhub made its first-ever Super Bowl appearance, announcing it will permanently eliminate delivery and service fees on restaurant orders over $50 to grab market share. Multivu

“We’re honored to be named the Exclusive Prediction Market Partner of the Wall Street Journal & the Dow Jones.” - Polymarket continues its march toward mainstream legitimacy with a landmark media partnership, proving that prediction markets are becoming embedded infrastructure for how we consume and trust information. X

“Known dating app launch” - Known launched in San Francisco as a post-swipe dating platform designed around intentionality and getting people on real dates, and another entry in the growing wave of dating startups challenging the incumbent model. X

Updates

Airbnb just reported Q4 earnings. GBV up 16%, our strongest growth in over two years." - Brian Chesky shared a thread breaking down Airbnb's Q4 results and the operating philosophy behind them: small teams, obsessive focus, and a two-year internal initiative called Project Hawaii that eliminated cleaning fees, simplified booking, and removed low-quality listings. The result is ~40% free cash flow margins and nearly $19B in free cash flow generated since IPO. X

“FJ Labs Q4 2025 Update” - Fabrice Grinda’s quarterly update is always worth reading: highlights include Vinted accelerating through €10B GMV and €1B revenue while highly profitable, Numerai raising $30M at a $500M valuation, and Refurbed approaching €1B GMV. Fabrice Grinda

“Update on Micro1: $200M RR now” - Micro1, the AI talent/data labeling marketplace, hit $200M in recurring revenue, a 2x jump in roughly 3 months, with a $100M round coming together. X

“CharterUP 2025 Recap: Year in Review” - CharterUP surpassed $2B in platform volume, completed 128,000 trips, and served 6M passengers across 12M miles traveled. LinkedIn

“Language learning marketplace Preply’s unicorn status embodies Ukrainian resilience” - Preply hit a $1.2B valuation after raising $150M in Series D funding, reaching EBITDA profitability after 12 months while maintaining 150 employees in Kyiv despite the ongoing war. TechCrunch

“Recap of 2025, as a first-time founder” - SideShift founder Nicholas Lawton shares a first-year recap: 800K creators on the platform, 700+ brands, $10M+ paid out to creators, and 25B+ views generated, demonstrating the explosive growth potential in the UGC/creator economy marketplace. X

“January was a record breaking month for Whop” - Whop posted January numbers: $240M+ earned by users globally, 50K daily signups, 252K businesses created, and 140% 12-month NRR. X

"Rejigg crosses $100M in transaction volume and raises $10.5M to build the future of SMB M&A" - Barrett Glasauer and Alex pulled the curtain back on what they've been building at Rejigg: $100M+ in platform transaction volume, $3B+ in businesses listed, 6X YoY growth in 2025, and a $10.5M raised. Be sure to watch the video. LinkedIn

Acquisitions

“eBay to Acquire Depop from Etsy for $1.2B in Cash” - eBay is buying secondhand fashion marketplace Depop for $1.2B which is a 26% haircut from the $1.62B Etsy paid five years ago, but a bet on a platform doing nearly $1B in GMS with 60% YoY U.S. growth and 7M active buyers, nearly 90% under 34. Fashion already generates $10B+ in annual GMV for eBay, and Depop gives them the younger, mobile-first audience. Etsy

“Rover Group Acquires Cat-Centric Marketplace, Meowtel” - In a classic vertical marketplace roll-up play, the world’s largest online pet care marketplace acquired the #1 cat sitting marketplace, which has grown to over 4,000 providers serving 125,000+ cats across 8,000 cities. Rover.com

People

“The AI Talent Wars Have Hit Data Labeling” - Mercor is offering $500K-$2M signing bonuses to poach micro1 employees, extending the AI talent wars from researchers into sales and operations roles at data-labeling marketplace companies.

So far, there’s no public sign that Mercor has successfully poached micro1 staff. According to LinkedIn, no one has yet made the jump. In one message viewed by Forbes, a micro1 employee rejected the pitch outright.

“Get out of here,” he replied. Forbes

“Airbnb announces Ahmad Al-Dahle as Chief Technology Officer” - Airbnb hired the former head of Meta’s Generative AI group (the team behind Llama) as CTO, with Brian Chesky framing the hire around making technology serve human connection and a signal that Airbnb’s AI strategy will be deeply integrated into the core marketplace experience. Airbnb

“Amir Nathoo Steps Back from Leading Outschool” - After 11 years, Outschool’s founder steps down from the education marketplace he built to 100,000+ live online classes serving 1M+ learners across 196 countries. LinkedIn

“Excited to share that I’ve joined Bounce as the first Chief Growth Officer.” - Andrew Tweed joins the luggage storage marketplace, which has already expanded to 100 countries with 35,000 locations backed by a16z and General Catalyst. LinkedIn

💰 Fundraising

Another raises $2.5M seed led by Anthemis Female Innovators Lab Fund - Another’s retail marketplace targets inventory liquidation, helping brands and retailers efficiently offload surplus stock.

FeltSense raises $5.1M - The round had participation from Draper Associates, Precursor Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, Yonder (🎉), and angels including Matt Schlicht (Moltbook), Jager McConnell (Crunchbase), and Peter Green (Republic).

Noise Announces $7.1M Series Seed Led by Paradigm - Noise raised a $7.1M seed round led by Paradigm, further validating the growing intersection of crypto infrastructure and marketplace models.

Ditto AI raises $9.2M seed round - Ditto AI is building an agentic social network focused on college dating, leveraging AI agents to automate match-making and date coordination with early viral adoption in university communities.

When raises $10.2M Series A to transform employee health benefits - When provides a workforce transitions platform offering an AI-powered marketplace for affordable healthcare coverage alternatives during employment changes. EINPresswire

Konnex raised $15M - Konnex is building a marketplace for autonomous robots that work like apps, contracted, verified, and paid, an ambitious bet on the future of physical labor marketplaces. X

Plug raises $20M Series A led by Lightspeed - Plug is building a real-time marketplace specialized in electric vehicle inventory, focusing on pricing transparency and rapid transactions to stabilize residual values in the growing EV market. LinkedIn

Hiive completes Series B on its own platform - Hiive, a private stock marketplace, completed its own Series B funding round using its own platform, a remarkable proof of concept that closed in just 6 weeks, including a record-setting $500M in December transaction volume alone. LinkedIn

Buy&Ship closes $12M Series C - Buy&Ship is a cross-border e-commerce enabler that uses AI-driven logistics and discovery to streamline international shopping, and is aggressively expanding into the U.S. market. HKSTP

Solace Health raises $130M Series C at a $1B valuation - Solace Health operates a patient advocacy marketplace that connects registered nurse advocates with patients to navigate complex healthcare, monetizing via Medicare reimbursement shares. EINPresswire

🥳 Yonder Fund I raises $4.64M to back marketplace founders - Yonder Fund focuses on early-stage marketplaces building new economies with embedded SaaS, fintech, and managed services to enhance defensibility and network effects. Yonder

📖 Reads

“Runnin’ Down A Dream” - Bill Gurley has written a new book, not about marketplaces, but about finding a career you love, which I am enjoying reading. I was lucky enough to hear him talk about it at the Future Titans conference put on by the one and only Daniel Dart (thank you for the copy of the book!). Amazon

“Top tips for founders building marketplaces in the AI era” - Olivia Moore at a16z shared her framework for how marketplaces are evolving in 2026, drawing on lessons from Airbnb, Instacart, and Whatnot. Required reading for marketplace founders! X

"Magic Tricks, Moats, and the Three-Body Problem of AI Networks" - Casey Winters argues that most AI consumer products today are "magic tricks"—novel but shallow—and that the real winners will optimize for structure and compounding density rather than virality, drawing parallels to the mobile era where Instagram and Uber came years after the initial App Store hype. Casey Accidental

"The Software Shakeout: What Is Durable and What Is Not in the Age of AI?" - Dan Hockenmaier's framework for which software companies survive the AI shakeout comes down to two questions: how hard is it for customers to switch, and does the product's value compound with scale? The real pressure is an explosion of competition from every direction: startups building cheaper, platforms verticalizing, incumbents moving horizontally, and customers shifting budgets from subscriptions to tokens. Dan Hock's Essays

"How DoorDash solved problems, pt 2." - Steve Kenning continues his series on DoorDash's operational playbook, this time on scoping solutions. His framework is simple: there are only three types of solutions to an operational business problem: add more people to do more of the same stuff, change a process so people are forced to do different stuff, or build a product so people don't have to do stuff anymore. Great example of how DoorDash Catering cut average delivery times by questioning whether to optimize the distribution, cut off the long tail, or delete the distribution entirely. Missing & Incorrect

“OpenAI Wants to Buy Pinterest?” - Speculation that OpenAI might acquire Pinterest for $17B highlights a fascinating strategic logic: OpenAI has the world’s best AI but almost no commerce data, while Pinterest processes 600M users doing 80B visual searches monthly (a lot of it with purchase intent). AI for E-commerce

“At what point do we agree you’re no longer a ‘prediction market’” - A timely question as Polymarket expands into media partnerships, sports betting, and financial markets, blurring the line between prediction market, exchange, and information platform. X

“Where Ambition Meets Guidance: The Growth Story Behind Leland” - Forbes profiles Leland, a coaching marketplace building real relationships between ambitious professionals and experienced coaches, showing how services marketplaces can thrive by going deep on trust and outcomes rather than competing on volume. Forbes

“No Hangover and Hard Abs: Welcome to Newest Kind of Partying” - The rise of “soft partying,” e.g. sober-curious social events, fitness meetups, and intellectual gatherings, is spawning a new wave of marketplace and community-building startups like Sweatpals ($16M raised), Offline, and Matinee Social Club, as young adults trade hangovers for genuine connection. Business Insider

📽 Watch or Listen

“Airbnb Co-Founder and CEO Brian Chesky says more AI founders should be starting consumer businesses.” - Chesky points out that 87% of Y Combinator companies are enterprise-focused, arguing the biggest prize is consumer AI—the kind that makes daily life easier for billions of people. LinkedIn

THE DART BOARD ep #35: Bill Gurley | Benchmark - Bill Gurley shares insights on building enduring businesses, the compounding nature of obsession and learning, and the transformative impact of AI on careers and marketplaces.

Keith Rabois and Eric Newcomer’s Heated Conversation on Tech, Trump, and Tariffs - Rabois discusses Ramp’s vision, AI investment theses, and the intersection of tech, politics, and ethics in today’s venture landscape. But most importantly, talks a bit about AI and marketplaces at 10:09.

"Starting & Scaling Hipcamp With Alyssa Ravasio | EM Group Chat #205" - Alyssa Ravasio, Founder & CEO of Hipcamp, breaks down how she built the largest marketplace for booking campsites, RV parks, and unique outdoor stays. from solving the cold start problem through education-first supply onboarding to scaling past $90M+ raised from a16z, Benchmark, and Index Ventures. Great discussion on how supply drives demand, bootstrapping before venture capital, and why network effects in outdoor stays look different from those in traditional travel marketplaces.

Thanks for reading!

That is a wrap for the week! As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any feedback or news I missed. Hot tips are always welcome. Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you’d like to schedule a call, you can find me on expert marketplaces Hubble or Intro.

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Power your marketplace with...

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I am thrilled to be partnering with Whop to share an EXCLUSIVE OFFER:

• Get your first $200K in volume processed for free.

• Accept Card, ACH, Venmo, Crypto, and more with one embedded checkout

• Instantly pay out globally in ACH, Venmo, PayPal, & crypto.

• Join the network trusted by innovators like Micro1, SideShift, and Metafy.

Learn what the hype is about and claim your benefits here.

Claim Your Offer

About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a longtime advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he served as the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and has worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, JustAnswer, and the Federal Reserve.

Highly Liquid

I started Yonder to fill a gap: there’s no first-check/pre-seed fund built specifically by and for marketplace operators. And now there is…

I’m excited to announce that I raised $4.64 million for Yonder Fund I. 🎉 

I feel incredibly fortunate to be backed by 91 world-class founders, operators, and investors from platforms that built online commerce as we know it.

I am even more excited to share that Venture Capital Journal covered the news today, and I wanted to share the story with this community, as you’ve been part of this journey from the beginning, and I am very grateful for that. 🙏

Now I need to ask one little favor…

Help me spread the word:

• LinkedIn

• X

Building a Firm, Not Just a Fund

When I announced the Yonder Fund last summer, I had a $2M fund and aimed to reach $3.2M to invest in 50 companies. The response was better than expected, and I raised more than 2.3X my initial fund size and grew AUM to over $7.2M. As with all things, a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck brought it all together, but it was clear to me that the story, thesis, and strategy all resonated deeply.

Closing the first fund is the first major milestone in building a firm that becomes the go-to for founders starting early-stage marketplaces and network-effect businesses. It is a big vision, and I believe Yonder can become the first name people think of when they start a marketplace. Building the brand is important, but, as in any marketplace, creating a strong network effect is critical to its success, and that means having great LPs alongside me.

“I’m an LP in 70 funds, Colin is in the top 5. Operators hearts with an investor’s mind.” - Jack Greco Co-Founder of ACV Auctions

Yonder’s real value lies beyond its capital and in the 91 LPs behind it. Our investor base is world-class and includes founders, operators, and investors from Airbnb, Uber, DoorDash, Amazon, eBay, Grubhub/Seamless, Thumbtack, StubHub, StockX, Whatnot, Mercari, OLX, OpenTable, Zillow, Trulia, ApartmentList, ACV Auctions, Reverb, Facebook Marketplace, Snapchat, Stripe, Pinterest, RetailMeNot, Turo, Outdoorsy, Peerspace, Avail, Rematter, and many more.

I also recently added Jack Greco, Co-Founder of ACV Auctions, as an advisor on the investment committee. He also happened to be my first check! For those who don't know Jack's story, he is an incredibly kind and giving person who is also a tremendous marketplace operator and investor and brings a lot of expertise to the table:

• Co-founded the used wholesale car marketplace ACV Auctions ($3.9B IPO), helping take it from 3 founders in Buffalo to IPO on the Nasdaq.

• Made 200+ angel investments in marketplace companies.

• Early investor in TCGPlayer (Pokemon marketplace), which sold to eBay ($295M), as well as Roofstock (single-family rental marketplace).

• LP in 70 funds.

• A huge Buffalo Bills fan.

The foundation is laid, the flywheel is spinning, and I am building the firm I wish existed when I was building.

Putting Chips On The Table

Yonder Fund I was built to invest early in marketplaces that build new economies. After scaling Outdoorsy to $3B+ in GMV and working with 100+ marketplaces, I kept seeing the same problem:

Exceptional marketplace founders couldn’t find investors who understood their business model at the earliest stages.

The most defensible marketplaces don’t just connect buyers and sellers; they wrap the core platform with SaaS tools, financial products, and managed services that embed deeply with customers, increase switching costs and liquidity, and enhance defensibility. I call this the Marketplace+ model, and it is the core of the fund’s thesis. The future is also AI, and AI-native marketplaces are being built as we speak.

The fund is business-model-specific but industry- and sector-agnostic with investments across AI agents, robots, derivatives, construction, childcare, fuel, gold, legal, healthcare, and more. I have already invested in 22 companies with a less than 2% acceptance rate from 1,000+ on-thesis deals. Given the larger fund size, I am expanding the portfolio to up to 70 companies to maintain diversification and invest in as many great opportunities as we can.

If you’re building a marketplace, I want to meet you: I’m writing $50-100K checks at first-check and pre-seed. Let’s create the next generation of marketplaces together! Apply here and then email me at colin@yonder.vc.

If you are interested in being an LP in the future, lets build a relationshiop and please reach out to me at colin@yonder.vc or submit your interest here.

I am incredibly excited about how the portfolio is shaping up and look forward to sharing more soon as more companies come out of stealth. Stay tuned and sign up below to get notified!

Going Forward

With the fund closed (meaning I am not taking new capital for Fund I), the focus is narrow for now: supporting our portfolio and finding the next wave of marketplace founders building new economies (and to be honest, always fundraising!).

I am deeply grateful for the 5,000 Take Rate readers who’ve built this community, to the 91 LPs who believed in the vision, to the founders who trusted me with their first institutional check. I would be nothing without you! 🙏

Special thanks to my wife and family for their support.

To Jack Greco for convincing me to do this and for being my first check.

To Sydecar for being a steady partner in the background, which makes running a fund so much easier for emerging managers.

If you want to receive quarterly updates on Yonder, please subscribe below.👇

Yonder VC - Marketplaces

Lastly, help me spread the word:

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About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a longtime advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he served as the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and has worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, JustAnswer, and the Federal Reserve.

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👋 Welcome to the 17th edition of the Marketplace Memo and first edition of 2026. My goal is to share curated news, content, and stories about marketplaces, with a splash of my own color. Please enjoy and share with others!

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Marketplace Memo Wrapped 2025

2025 was a year of contrasts where many things were true at once. “AI marketplaces” exploded, with labor marketplaces like Mercor hitting a $500M run rate in 17 months, and OpenAI launched its own shopping marketplace features, among many other developments. Prediction market wars broke out with Polymarket and Kalshi raising billions. Meanwhile, VC funding stayed brutal for non-AI companies, and many traditional marketplaces struggled to grow. All while Craigslist turned 30 years old, essentially the same design, same model, and still humming along.

The future arrived. The past still works, and network effects are still undefeated. Many truths can co-exist.

Personally, it was a big year for me as I launched and closed Yonder’s first fund (more to come), had baby #4, and had the first full year of writing the Marketplace Memo. The first memo unexpectedly took off, growing Take Rate and re-teaching me that when you solve your own pain point, it can really resonate with others.

Where It Started and How It’s Going

• First Marketplace Memo: December 13, 2024

• Subscribers then: 2,265

• Subscribers now: 4,326

• Growth: 91% (+2,061 subscribers)

• Total Memos Published: 15

• Total Other Posts: 9

• Total Webpage Views: 171,893

• Most Popular Posts

  • AI and Marketplaces: The Future is Agent-Led Marketplaces

  • Vampire Attacks: How Marketplaces Overcome the Chicken-and-Egg Problem

  • Marketplace Startup Fundraising 2025

But most importantly, a lot happened in marketplaces this year. Let's recap.

🔥 The Highlight(s)

12 Marketplaces Themes in 2025

1. AI created a new labor category. Among many AI labor marketplaces, like Scale, micro1, Handshake AI, and Turing, Mercor stood out and grew from $1M to $500M+ revenue run rate in 17 months as demand exploded. The new category? AI evaluation labor e.g. domain experts teaching models what “good” looks like. As always, unlocking new economic activity can lead to explosive growth.

2. OpenAI became a marketplace. ChatGPT launched shopping (Etsy, Shopify, Walmart integrations), a jobs platform, and app integrations with Zillow, Instacart, and Kayak. This pattern repeats with new platform adoption: aggregate attention, then capture transactions.

3. Prediction markets went mainstream. Kalshi raised $1B at $11B; Polymarket raised up to $2B at $9B. Now, if you can predict something, you can make a market for it.

4. Alternative commerce scaled. Whatnot raised $225M at $11.5B valuation, and Whop hit $2B GTV and $142M revenue, both combining tooling with marketplace distribution and showing the strength of the Marketplace+ model.

5. Used is the new new. Vinted broke €10B GMV and €1B revenue. OfferUp’s data shows 93% of Americans bought something secondhand in 2025. Recommerce is no longer niche and is here to stay.

6. The IPO window cracked open. StubHub filed (S-1: $8.7B GMV, ~20% take rate, $299M EBITDA). EquipmentShare also did an S-1 filing. This is the first meaningful marketplace IPO activity in a while outside of Instacart (2023).

7. AI agent marketplaces arrived. AWS, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI all launched AI agent marketplaces. We know agent-based tools like Manus and Perplexity are reshaping how users discover and transact. AI and marketplaces aren’t competing; they’re converging as predicted. If you’re not building with agents in mind, you’re building for yesterday.

8. Tariffs reshuffled the deck. Temu lost up to 58% of its US daily users after the de minimis ended. Amazon dramatically pulled back ad spend. But disruption created winners: rental, recommerce, and domestic recycling marketplaces all caught tailwinds.

9. Airbnb went beyond stays. Launched Services in 260 cities with $200-250M investment and with 2B+ cumulative guests, they might pull it off.

10. Mobility’s shakeout year. Uber started throwing off cash. GM slashed Cruise. Waymo took off. Kalanick was trying to buy Pony AI. Getaround shut down US ops. Turo pulled its IPO twice before acquiring Kyte. The dust has yet to settle, and the race to AV dominance has only just begun.

11. Dating apps are in crisis. Spencer Rascoff joined Match as CEO. Whitney Wolfe Herd returned to Bumble, then laid off 30% of its staff, saying “dating apps feel like a thing of the past.” The category is searching for its next chapter.

12. Ads became the business. DoorDash ads hit $1B run rate. Amazon’s ad business continued to climb as its highest-margin segment.

It was a full year, and many of these evolutions will carry over into 2026. Now, let’s see what has been happening!

📰 News

"Boatsetter and Getmyboat announce merger, forming powerhouse marketplace for boat rentals" - The two leading boat-sharing platforms are combining to create the global leader in on-the-water experiences, with more than half a billion dollars in combined bookings across 50 countries. Michael Farb, Boatsetter's CEO since 2022, will lead the combined entity headquartered in Miami. The merger follows the classic marketplace consolidation playbook, combining inventory and demand to accelerate network effects in a category projected to reach $36B by 2032. Both platforms remain active for now as they integrate. Boatsetter

“Coursera to combine with Udemy to empower the global workforce with skills for the AI era” - Two learning marketplace giants are joining forces in a pivotal consolidation. As AI rapidly redefines skills requirements across every industry, the combined platform aims to serve the global talent market at an unprecedented scale. This is the marketplace duopoly pattern playing out, and sometimes they merge like Boatsetter/Getmyboat. LinkedIn

"Coinbase partners with Kalshi to launch prediction markets in 'Everything Exchange' push" - The crypto exchange announced it will source prediction market order flow from Kalshi, letting users trade on elections, sports, and economic indicators directly in the Coinbase app. This is the same distribution model Robinhood uses with Kalshi. The prediction market startup provides liquidity, while Coinbase serves as the front end, likely splitting fees. Fortune

“Coinbase System, updated: Stocks, prediction markets, and millions of DEX assets” - Coinbase is rapidly expanding beyond crypto into a complete financial marketplace. The future of finance is converging on single platforms that offer everything. X

“Polymarket receives CFTC approval for intermediation” - The prediction marketplace announced regulatory approval that paves the way for seamless access through registered brokers and financial institutions, and is a legitimization moment for prediction markets as they’re becoming integrated into traditional financial infrastructure. X

“Uber CEO says robotaxis are a ‘trillion-dollar-plus’ business” - Dara Khosrowshahi expects Uber to be in 10+ markets by next year, with Asia Pacific as a key growth region. Japan’s aging population creates real transportation needs beyond large cities. The company now works with 20+ AV partners, including Waymo, Baidu, WeRide, and Pony.ai. I tend to agree that Uber’s demand-side aggregation advantage will win out in the long term, as AVs become commoditized, limiting brand advantages. Business Insider

“Shopify announces Uber Direct integration for same-day local delivery” - Merchants can now fulfill online orders in-store for same-day local delivery. The integration of logistics into commerce platforms continues “because customers want your products now, not next week.” X

“Grindr goes ‘AI-first’ as it strives to be an ‘everything app for the gay guy’” - CEO George Arison is positioning Grindr to become much more than a dating app and expanding into health and wellness, travel, and local discovery. The company aims to reach $1B in revenue by leveraging its unique position as both a social product and a gay public health platform. As noted above, dating marketplaces are having an identity crisis. WIRED

"Mercor's 2025 wrapped” - The post below says it all.

“Mercor 3 years old” - Vignette on the founding of Mercor and where it is today: “Within 8 months, we scaled Mercor to a $1M revenue run rate and dropped out of college. Shortly after, we started speaking with the top AI labs, realizing we’d found our ideal customer. Mercor is now paying $2M / day to experts on our platform, with an average pay rate of $95 / hour.”

“How Palmstreet is growing millionaires—and livestreaming e-commerce” - The livestream auction platform now has 5,500+ active sellers, with 20% running full-time businesses and more than 20 sellers crossing $1M+ in revenue. One seller quit her corporate job after four months and now nets $1K-$10K per auction selling exotic plants. Inc.com

“Whop teases major product announcements across payments, crypto, advertising, and AI” - Co-founder Steven Schwartz signaled that the platform is preparing significant expansions beyond its core digital goods platform. Fresh off hitting $2B in gross transaction value and $142M in revenue, Whop continues its aggressive push to become the default infrastructure layer for internet businesses. The payments and advertising additions suggest Whop is building the full Marketplace+ stack, combining transaction infrastructure with monetization tools that lock in both supply and demand. X

“Whop becomes official payments network for micro1” - The AI data labeling marketplace is now powered by Whop’s payment rails. More partnership announcements to come. X

“DoorDash CEO Tony Xu responds to viral fake Reddit post” - A Reddit post claiming DoorDash had a “Desperation Score” to exploit drivers went viral. Xu’s response was unequivocal: “Holy fucking shit is right! This is not DoorDash, and I would fire anyone who promoted or tolerated the kind of culture described.” The post was completely fabricated, but Xu’s direct response demonstrates how marketplace leaders must actively defend their culture and reputation. X

“Dribbble reinvents itself as a revenue-sharing marketplace” - The design community platform has entirely reinvented itself as a lead-generation marketplace for designers and developers, delivering "billions of dollars in opportunity" and millions in payouts. YoY growth is staggering: +81% project requests, +353% proposals, +715% accepted proposals, and +1,163% total accepted proposal value. Classic platform evolution from community to commerce. Dribbble

"AppSumo CEO Noah Kagan shares 2026 strategy: quality over volume, TidyCal moonshot" - Noah Kagan outlines AppSumo's pivot after a challenging 2025 marked by "trust issues, partner closures, and a core business that felt harder to run than it should." The software deals marketplace is tightening its lifetime deals model with higher quality standards while betting on TidyCal, its scheduling tool, aiming for $4M in monthly GMV in bookings and payments. X

"Travis Kalanick's CloudKitchens Delays Middle East IPO" - The ghost kitchen company backed by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund has postponed plans to list its Middle Eastern business, opting instead to explore private placement options. CloudKitchens, with 400+ locations in 30 countries, represents Kalanick's vision for "cooking-as-a-service" where AI-optimized meals are delivered directly to customers. Bloomberg

“Travis Kalanick’s backgammon nerd sidequest” - The Uber founder bought eXtremeGammon, the preeminent backgammon engine, and is looking for a “re-founding” CEO. X

💰 Fundraising

Tradepost raises $4.6M Seed led by Andreessen Horowitz - The marketplace makes everything instantly liquid by aggregating market makers who compete to give consumers real-time, fair offers. Starting with tickets, users can take a picture of an item or search for one and get an instant offer. As a16z’s Olivia Moore noted: “Every platform shift spawns a legendary new set of consumer marketplaces—and AI is no exception.” LinkedIn

Mobius Materials raises $3M Seed led by Spero Ventures - The semiconductor spot marketplace is solving a $25B problem in an industry where there’s nowhere for manufacturers to trade chips besides rigid direct purchasing or a massive gray market. Mobius Materials

Spryker secures capital boost led by TCV and One Peak - The B2B commerce platform helps enterprises implement marketplaces, subscription services, and vendor portals. With AI-assisted developer productivity and agentic AI suited to complex B2B processes, Spryker is positioned to capitalize on the digitalization wave hitting manufacturers, distributors, and service companies. Spryker

📖 Reads

“ARR at the time of fundraise in 2025” - New SVB/Carta data (h/t ) on ARR at fundraise in 2025. To translate this to marketplace terms, here is the implied GMV for the $2.8M median Series A ARR:

• 5% take rate: $56M GMV

• 10% take rate: $28M GMV

• 15% take rate: $18.7M GMV

• 20% take rate: $14M GMV

ARR doesn't exactly translate to net revenue, but I think it's a pretty good benchmark. As always, growth rate matters, too. Here are the implied revenue step-ups at the median:
- Series A → Series B: 3.0x ($2.8M → $8.4M)
- Series B → Series C: 1.9x ($8.4M → $16.1M)

“The internet got rid of middlemen and gave us low take marketplaces. AI is getting rid of marketplaces and giving us (hopefully) even lower take middlemen.” - A provocative observation from Will Quist of Slow Ventures about the evolution of commerce infrastructure. The question isn’t whether AI disrupts marketplaces, but what replaces them. X

“How ChatGPT’s Native Shopping Could Rewrite Digital Commerce” - Viant CEO Tim Vanderhook argues that LLM-powered commerce is “the most accurate thing we have as mankind” for predicting consumer intent, suggesting brands should flip their traditional 70/30 spend ratio to invest more in brand-building for AI visibility rather than demand capture. Search Engine Journal

“A Guide to the Marketplace ‘Plus’ Model” - Based on my interview, at breaks down the strategy of providing either supply or demand something useful as a hook to enter the network. OpenTable started as a digital seating chart before becoming a reservation platform. Outdoorsy built a SaaS that turned clipboards into systems of record. Mostly Metrics

“Leaving RVshare: Reflections from a 7.5-year journey” - Martijn Scheijbeler recaps lessons from scaling an RVshare through COVID, M&A (KKR acquisition), and the efficiency era. Martijn Scheijbeler

“The Agentic AI Adoption Matrix: Consumer & Travel” - Thomas Reiner created a framework that maps agentic AI solutions by human trust requirements and technical difficulty. The sweet spot insight: “I’d happily let my AI agent cancel a $12.99 Paramount+ subscription, but I’d think twice before letting it buy furniture for my living room.” Travel is the ideal test case because it sits across the entire matrix—highly emotional, high monetary stakes, and a messy ecosystem. Platform Aeronaut

“Diffusion of AI Across Vertical Markets” - delivers a comprehensive analysis using Rogers’ “Diffusion of Innovations” and Evans’ “Absorb/Innovate/Disrupt” frameworks. The core insight: vertical markets are lagging not because AI’s potential is low, but because current AI tools are “still mostly contorting itself around existing workflows, rather than reimagining and reshaping them.” The winners will be Vertical Workflow Architects who understand both the lived reality of industries and what it takes to produce venture-scale change. Euclid Insights

“5 New Things We Learned About Marketplaces This Year” - highlights five key insights: (1) Time-to-value is the new kingmaker; AI collapsed onboarding friction; (2) Negative network effects show up sooner with AI-generated content flooding; (3) Synthetic supply is now a real bootstrapping strategy; (4) Reputation layers are becoming portable; (5) Winner-take-most is weakening as AI-driven multi-homing erodes single-platform dominance. Essential reading for understanding how marketplace dynamics are shifting. SNAK VC

“How to Hire a Great CTO (Even If You’re Not a Technologist)” - Spencer Rascoff (CEO of Tinder/Match Group) shares his 10-step playbook for hiring Vinay Kuruvila. Key criteria: someone who hasn’t drifted far from hands-on work, cares about the category, has recent real AI experience, and balances big-company rigor with startup scrappiness. “Technology is moving too fast to lead from the sidelines.” Life at Tinder

“I thought scale would make dealing with seasonality easier, but it made it harder” - Evan Reece shares a bit about his experience building Liftopia. The majority of the headcount were FTEs needed year-round, but they only generated revenue for 4 months of the year. Essentially, a team that needed to handle $450M-equivalent volume when only handling $150M. What he’d do differently: broaden into counter-seasonal businesses sooner, blend transactional with recurring revenue, and price more appropriately to value. LinkedIn

“Why Uber bears hyper-focused on AVs are missing the bigger picture” - A X thread breaks down Uber’s AV strategy: Q3 ‘25 gross bookings hit nearly $50B (up 21%), and the company is accelerating despite Waymo’s market share growth. AVs are expensive assets that can’t sit idle, but ride-share demand fluctuates wildly. Uber’s hybrid approach, using AVs for predictable base demand and human drivers for peaks, solves the utilization problem. That’s why Waymo partnered with Uber in Austin and Atlanta: instant volume without idle depreciating assets. Add climate limitations (AVs only proven in sunbelt states) and a fragmenting AV market with Avride and other OEMs plugging in, and Uber isn’t getting replaced.

📽 Watch or Listen

“DoorDash has four huge revenue streams no one knows about” - Everyone thinks of DoorDash as an American food delivery service. They’re wrong. CEO Tony Xu broke down the company’s diversified business, noting that one stream already generates a billion in annualized revenue. The best marketplaces don’t stay one-dimensional. They stack revenue building blocks.

“Nail Your Raise: Luring VCs” - Vinod Khosla delivers a masterclass on effective pitching. Must watch for founders out there fundraising. Khosla Ventures

“What Travis Kalanick Taught Bradley Tusk, & Why He Closed His VC Fund” - On Sourcery with Molly O’Shea, Bradley Tusk discusses what he learned working closely with Travis during Uber’s early regulatory battles and why he returned to an equity-for-services model. Travis was “unusually fast, analytical, and willing to challenge institutions,” which is a mindset that shaped how Uber approached politics and growth. YouTube

“Polymarket CEO says his prediction market is ‘the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now’” - On 60 Minutes, Shayne Coplan explains how Polymarket works, why it correctly predicted the 2024 election when pollsters called it too close to call, and why the NYSE’s owner just invested $2 billion. CBS News

“Everything Marketplaces Group Chat #203 with Deepak Chhugani (Nuvocargo)” - Deepak Chhugani, Founder & CEO of Nuvocargo, shares how he built a leading cross-border freight platform that’s raised $75M+ from Y Combinator, NFX, and Tiger Global. The conversation covers the pivot that led to Nuvocargo, evolving from tech-enabled brokerage to full platform, sequencing new services, and how they’re leveraging AI agents across operations. Packed with tactical insights on GTM strategies, sales approaches, the “full-stack AI” vs. vertical agent debate, and building defensibility in the age of AI.

Thanks for reading!

That is a wrap for the week! As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any feedback or news I missed. Hot tips are always welcome. Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you’d like to schedule a call, you can find me on expert marketplaces Hubble or Intro.

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About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a longtime advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he served as the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and has worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, JustAnswer, and the Federal Reserve.

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👋 Welcome to the 16th edition of the Marketplace Memo. My goal is to share curated news, content, and stories about marketplaces, with a splash of my own color. Please enjoy and share with others!

Power your marketplace with...

Whop Rails – Build a marketplace or platform on our global payment rails.

Built for marketplaces by a marketplace. Platforms are using Whop Rails to get the most competitive pricing, global payouts in ACH, Venmo, PayPal, & stablecoins, payment orchestration, and more! Learn what the hype is about here.

Book a call

When Everything Becomes a Market Vibe

Here’s something new: you can now bet on whether Labubu dolls will hit a certain resale price without actually buying the dolls themselves.

Kalshi, the prediction market that just raised $1B at a $11B valuation, partnered with StockX this week to launch “product event contracts” on sneakers, Pokémon cards, and collectibles. Want to predict which brands will see the most Black Friday trading volume? There’s a market for that.

This partnership might sound a bit niche, but it’s actually the logical endgame of a trend of marketplaces bringing offline inventory online: as more things get priced transparently, more things become tradable. And once something is tradable, someone will build a marketplace around it. The pattern plays out the same way every time: transactions generate data and transparency; transparency reveals accurate prices; accurate prices create liquid markets; and liquid markets attract more participants looking to trade, speculate, or hedge.

StockX started by creating transparent pricing for sneakers, turning them into an asset class. Now, Kalshi is building financial products on top of that asset class. It’s marketplaces layered on marketplaces, and we’re only seeing the beginning.

The first wave of marketplaces built the pricing infrastructure that makes all of this possible. Now AI is accelerating what comes next. With AI handling data analysis, risk modeling, and market-making at scale, the cost of spinning up derivative markets for niche categories is collapsing. We’re entering an era where any asset class with measurable outcomes and pricing data can support layers of financial products.

🔥 The Highlight

Whop just delivered a whopping $2B in GMV and hit $142M in revenue. Most people haven’t heard of Whop, but they should pay attention. Founded in 2021, Whop is a services marketplace and selling infrastructure—think Shopify—for creators to sell and gate digital products, communities, and tools with built-in payments and permissions.

Sellers come for the tooling, stay for the marketplace. Buyers come for the services, stay for the selection.

This strategy is the Marketplace+ model in action:

• Build the infra → attract supply

• Aggregate supply → attract demand

• Aggregate demand → compound supply

• Take rate + SaaS → scale revenue

Marketplace + SaaS for the win!

📰 News

“Travel site GetYourGuide nears €1 billion in sales, profit after pandemic slump” - The Berlin-based experiences marketplace hit profitability for the first time with revenue approaching €1B ($1.2B) and a record 10M experiences booked in Q3, up 30% YoY. Bloomberg

“Vinted CEO announces €10B GMV and €1B revenue milestone for 2025” - Thomas Plantenga shared that the secondhand marketplace is on track to surpass €10B in annual GMV and €1B in revenue this year, driven by turning Germany into a top market, expanding Vinted Go (their verification service) to 5 markets, and launching Vinted Pay. LinkedIn

“Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says ChatGPT integration not ready for Airbnb app” - While competitors like Booking and Expedia have integrated with ChatGPT, Chesky held back because the SDK isn’t “quite robust enough” for Airbnb’s verified community model, but is open to integration once the platform matures. The company is instead relying heavily on Alibaba’s Qwen model for its AI customer service agent, which is “very good, fast, and cheap.” Bloomberg

“Airbnb will test adding Instacart grocery delivery to its app as a guest service” - Starting January 5, Airbnb will pilot “kitchen stocking” in Phoenix, Orlando, and Los Angeles, allowing guests to order groceries up to three weeks before arrival. Hosts will receive $25 per completed order ($100 for their first) for receiving and putting away groceries before check-in, expanding Airbnb’s Services strategy that CEO Brian Chesky expects will add $1B+ in annual revenue. Bloomberg

“SideShift crosses 500,000+ creators milestone” - The creator marketplace platform announced reaching half a million creators, with CEO Nick Lawton declaring ambitions to build “the largest creator marketplace on earth for the next generation.” LinkedIn

“Turo launches a new alternative to leasing and financing a vehicle that reimagines car ownership” - The car-sharing marketplace is expanding beyond short-term rentals with month-long bookings, monthly payment plans, and all-inclusive pricing. Trips lasting three or more months are Turo’s fastest-growing segment year-to-date with triple-digit YoY growth, reflecting the shift from ownership to access. PR Newswire

“ElevenLabs launches Iconic Marketplace with Sir Michael Caine partnership” - The AI voice company launched a two-sided platform where companies can request access to iconic talent for projects, starting with 25+ voices, including Sir Michael Caine, Dr. Maya Angelou, Alan Turing, Liza Minnelli, and Art Garfunkel. The marketplace is positioned as a “performer-first approach” with partnerships through CMG Worldwide, ensuring collaboration is rooted in respect, consent, and creative authenticity. ElevenLabs

“Amazon demands Perplexity stop AI agent from making purchases” - Amazon sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity after the AI search company’s new “Buy with Pro” feature began autonomously purchasing items on Amazon without proper authorization. The feature, which uses Perplexity’s AI agent to complete checkout flows, highlights the emerging friction between AI agents and existing marketplace infrastructure. Bloomberg

“Facebook Marketplace gets a glow up” - Meta rolled out major updates targeting Gen Z users, including collections for collaborative shopping with friends, reactions and comments on listings, AI-powered suggested questions for sellers, AI insights for vehicle listings, and expanded inventory from eBay and Poshmark. One in four young adult daily active Facebook users in the US and Canada now use Marketplace, making it a critical platform for social commerce. Meta

“Certified pre-owned Ford vehicles now available on Amazon Autos” - Ford expanded its partnership with Amazon by adding certified pre-owned vehicles to Amazon Autos, the e-commerce giant’s growing automotive marketplace. The move signals Amazon’s continued push into the vehicle marketplace beyond new-car sales. Ford

“Beehiiv ad network hits $50K revenue days, approaching $20M run rate” - Tyler Denk, Beehiiv’s founder, shared that the newsletter platform’s ad network has had multiple $50K revenue days in recent weeks, translating to nearly a $20M annual run rate. The Marketplace+ (SaaS + Ad Marketplace) strikes again. X

“New Army-led task force plans to stand up digital marketplace for counter-drone tech” - The Joint Interagency Task Force 401 is establishing an online marketplace where military leaders and agency heads can purchase counter-unmanned aerial systems (c-UAS) equipment. The marketplace will provide authoritative data on how systems perform under varying conditions, allowing buyers to select tools that match their specific requirements. Breaking Defense

“Athletes Untapped expands private coaching access across 16 sports with 3,000+ vetted instructors” - The Philadelphia-based marketplace has facilitated over 100,000 private coaching sessions since 2022 at an average rate of $40-70 per hour, positioning specialized instruction within reach for families who previously found it cost-prohibitive. Youth Sports Business Report

“EVQLV launches Abtique, the first marketplace for AI-designed molecules validated in independent labs” - Scientists can now order lab-ready antibody sequences online in minutes through this “click-to-sequence” platform, backed by EVQLV’s HyperBind2 AI system. PR Newswire

💰 Fundraising

SuperMe raises $6.8M Seed - The AI expert network platform, founded by Casey Winters and Ludo Antonov, enables experts to create AI versions of themselves that answer questions in their voice by training on their content, private documents, and work history. Mike Duboe led the round at Greylock. Upstarts

Big Rentals raises $2.8M Seed - The Los Angeles-based equipment rental marketplace is building an asset-light platform that aggregates inventory from independent trailer, dumpster, and equipment rental businesses. Led by SNAK Venture Partners with participation from Ironspring Ventures, Forum Ventures, Jason Calacanis’s LAUNCH Fund, and NuFund Venture Group. SNAK VC

Tractor Junction raises $22.6M Series A - The India-based rural vehicle marketplace raised $17M in equity funding led by Astanor, plus $5.6M in debt, with participation from existing investors InfoEdge Ventures and Omnivore. AgFunder News

Agentio raises $40M Series B - The creator marketplace connecting brands with YouTube creators for sponsored video campaigns uses AI-powered matching and content review to automate ad buying at scale. Led by Forerunner with participation from existing investors Benchmark, Craft Ventures, AlleyCorp, Antler, and Starting Line, the round values the company at $340 million and brings total funding to $56 million since its 2023 founding by ex-Cameo president Arthur Leopold and former Spotify engineer Jonathan Meyers. TechCrunch

ShopMy raises $70M at $1.5B valuation - The curated commerce infrastructure company raised from Avenir (lead), with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Menlo Ventures. ShopMy operates an integrated marketing system serving premium brands, 185,000+ hand-picked tastemakers, and consumers, facilitating over $1B in annual platform sales. PR Newswire

Whatnot raises $225M Series F at $11.5B valuation - The livestream shopping platform more than doubled its valuation from $5B in January, with the round co-led by DST Global and CapitalG. The company has surpassed $6B in GMV so far in 2025 (more than double all of 2024) and has become the #1 shopping app in Apple’s App Store, expanding from collectibles into 140+ categories. Previous investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Greycroft, Sequoia Capital, and Y Combinator. Crunchbase

Mercor raises $350M Series C at $10B valuation - The AI talent marketplace 5x’ed its valuation from $2B in February, with the round led by Felicis and participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst, and Robinhood Ventures. The 22-year-old founders (Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha) are now the youngest self-made billionaires in history. TechCrunch

Kraken raises $800M - The cryptocurrency exchange reached a $20 billion valuation in a dual-tranche funding round, up from $15 billion just two months prior. The primary tranche was led by Jane Street, HSG, Oppenheimer Alternative Investment Management, and Tribe Capital, with Citadel Securities contributing $200 million as a strategic second tranche investment. Reuters

Kalshi raises $1B at $11B valuation - The prediction market platform, allowing users to bet on future events, has more than doubled its valuation in less than two months, led by returning investors Sequoia and CapitalG. The company reached $50B in annualized trading volume in October and is currently navigating legal disputes with state regulators over gambling classification. TechCrunch

Faire announces employee tender offer at $5.2B valuation - The wholesale marketplace connecting independent retailers with brands initiated an approximately $100 million tender offer allowing select employees to sell shares, marking its first public valuation since raising $400 million at $12.4 billion in 2021 and representing a 58% markdown from that peak amid broader tech valuation resets. New investor WCM Investment Management leads the secondary share sale with participation from existing holder Baillie Gifford and new investor True North Fund, positioning the company closer to an eventual IPO while providing liquidity to early employees. Faire

📖 Reads

“Yonder Q3 2025 Update” - My update on the Yonder portfolio covering the state of marketplace investing, what I am looking for next, and a bit about the portfolio companies. Yonder

“Marketplaces in the Age of AI, Take Two: Graveyard to Greenfield” - Olivia Moore’s latest piece arguing that AI isn’t opening brand new marketplace categories but rather reviving categories where marketplaces previously failed (talent, home services, real estate, repairs). AI as the middleman reduces CAC through automated intake/vetting and increases LTV through reducing manual coordination and driving repeat transactions. Andreessen Horowitz

“Our Source of Truth on Prosumer Software” - Forerunner Ventures analyzes the $90-120B prosumer market, tracing its evolution through four waves from bundled licenses (Microsoft Office) to AI-powered platforms (ChatGPT, Cursor). Forerunner Ventures

“Kalshi says its prediction markets will compete directly with U.S. equities within a few years” - Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour now believes prediction markets could reach a trillion-dollar scale and compete with traditional equities much faster than his original decade-long timeline, accelerated by the company’s legal win allowing election contracts. Cryptopolitan

“The Coasean Singularity? Demand, Supply, and Market Design with AI Agents” - NBER research paper examining how AI agents will transform digital markets by dramatically reducing transaction costs. The paper evaluates agent adoption as derived demand (users trade off decision quality against effort reduction), supply-side design and monetization decisions, and market-level impacts, including efficiency gains from lower search/contracting costs alongside new frictions like congestion and price obfuscation. NBER

“San Francisco’s youngest billionaires are betting on a new kind of job boom” - Deep profile of Mercor’s 22-year-old founders and their vision that humans will spend the next decade teaching machines “the judgment, nuance, and taste that only humans possess,” creating a new dominant labor category rather than experiencing white-collar job displacement. SF Standard

“Big Things: Mercor’s Vision for Human Expertise in the AI Economy” - Brendan Foody outlines Mercor’s three strategic pillars: building a vast talent network (with 50%+ of new experts from referrals), advancing matching systems to pair experts with opportunities where they create 10x value, and accelerating delivery speed across the entire data production lifecycle. The core thesis: human data is the foundation of the new economy, and as AI expands its capabilities, new categories of work will emerge in which humans provide the context that models lack. X

“Klook IPO: S1 Breakdown” - Comprehensive breakdown of the experiences marketplace approaching $3B in GTV with $540M in revenue, revealing the unit economics of the mobile-first, last-minute booking platform that just achieved breakeven with $3.5M adjusted EBITDA. Mostly Metrics

“#32 - Marketplaces & Market Caps: Why Some Public Marketplaces Thrive and Others Nosedive” - Analysis of the top marketplace IPOs of the last decade showing Uber up 160% from IPO, DoorDash up 200%, and Etsy up 250%, while Lyft is down 60% and Coupang down 16%. Winners share: path to 20%+ EBITDA margins, positive cohort payback on CAC, market share leadership, defensible supply, and multi-product potential. Losers are structurally unprofitable with commodity products and weak network effects. SNAK VC

“4 Reasons Meta Will Win the Local Job Market” - Meta relaunched job listings in October 2025, this time focusing exclusively on local, entry-level, trade, and service jobs rather than competing with LinkedIn. The company’s advantages: 300M+ US Marketplace users (30% aged 25-34), integration into the highly-trafficked Marketplace feed where jobs appear organically, free posting (vs. paid competitors), and built-in Messenger recruitment automation. EJ Lawless

📽 Watch or Listen

“The Marketplace Plus Model Explained | Colin Gardiner of Yonder VC” - I share lessons from scaling Outdoorsy’s peer-to-peer RV platform, where the biggest unlock came from power hosts optimizing utilization through SaaS tools rather than casual users. The conversation covers monetization strategies, pricing psychology, take-rate optimization, the balance between product-market fit and margin obsession, and how AI and the decline of SEO are reshaping marketplace discovery. YouTube

“Kalshi Founders Tarek Mansour & Luana Lopes Lara On Turning Events Into Assets” - Kalshi’s co-founders discuss how prediction markets are emerging as a legitimate new asset class by turning real-world outcomes like elections, inflation, and sports into tradable event contracts.

“Vibe analysis: How Faire uses Cursor, enterprise search, and custom agents to analyze data” - Faire’s data team demonstrates how AI tools like Cursor, ChatGPT, and custom agents are transforming analytics workflows, allowing product managers and engineers to investigate business metrics, analyze experiments, and extract survey insights with dramatically less time and technical expertise required.

“Turo Adds Months-Long Rentals as Ownership Alternative” - Andre Haddad, Turo CEO, discusses the company’s new offering, which allows users to access cars for months at a time without committing to a lease or traditional ownership, and explains the consumer shift from ownership to access models.

Thanks for reading!

That is a wrap for the week! As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any feedback or news I missed. Hot tips are always welcome. Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you’d like to schedule a call, you can find me on expert marketplaces Hubble or Intro.

Share

Power your marketplace with...

Whop Rails – Build a marketplace or platform on our global payment rails.

Built for marketplaces by a marketplace. Platforms are using Whop Rails to get the most competitive pricing, global payouts in ACH, Venmo, PayPal, & stablecoins, payment orchestration, and more! Learn what the hype is about here.

Book a call

About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a longtime advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he served as the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and has worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, JustAnswer, and the Federal Reserve.

Subscribe now

👋 Welcome to the 15th edition of the Marketplace Memo. My goal is to share curated news, content, and stories related to marketplaces, along with a splash of my own color. Please enjoy and share with others!

I apologize for the slight posting hiatus. I have been heads down with the launch of Yonder and focused on finishing fundraising before my final close of the fund in December. 🎉

Thank you for all the love on the announcement, which got about 50K views! I can’t wait to share more.

Brought to you by me!

Yonder – Investing early in marketplaces that build new economies

The fund announcement brought so many new excellent LPs to the fund that I wanted to keep expanding the network. If you are interested in being an LP, please reach out to me at colin@yonder.vc or submit your interest below. I am closing the fund in mid-December.

Submit Your Interest

Everything Becomes a Marketplace Vibe

If you build a platform where people gather, you’ll eventually start charging rent. AI platforms are no exception.

Two weeks ago, OpenAI announced that you can now buy products directly from ChatGPT, starting with Etsy and expanding to Shopify merchants via their new Agentic Commerce Protocol built in partnership with Stripe. They quickly followed, announcing they will also be adding Walmart products, a stark juxtaposition to Amazon blocking AI agents from crawling their products. ChatGPT has evolved from being a helpful AI assistant to 700 million weekly users and is now a nascent commerce platform. OpenAI also launched a jobs platform, and frankly, we should be expecting them to come after any vertical with scale and revenue potential.

This is the inevitable evolution we see everywhere: platforms aggregate demand, build trust, reduce friction, and then begin capturing the value exchange that occurs on their platform. Google did it with ads. Amazon did it with third-party sellers. TikTok did it with shopping. Now OpenAI is doing it with conversational commerce. The pattern is consistent. What makes this particularly interesting is the speed at which it’s happening and the high-stakes game for big brands of whether to partner with OpenAI or not (or with someone else).

Patrick Collison nailed it: “It’s clear that internet purchasing modalities are going to change a lot.” If your platform has daily attention and trust, adding commerce isn’t a question of if but when. The marketplace gravitational pull is too strong to resist, and the network effect it can build is undeniable. Today, it’s ChatGPT buying you a handmade coffee mug from Etsy. Tomorrow? We’ll see, but I guarantee it’ll involve a take rate (OpenAI is taking a merchant fee).

🔥 The Highlight

And if the above news wasn’t enough, the following week, OpenAI announced Apps in ChatGPT with direct integrations with Zillow, Instacart, Kayak, Redfin, and others through ChatGPT, making it even more of an aggregator. You can now house hunt, grocery shop, and book flights without ever leaving the chat interface (it is not perfect and a bit clunky from my testing).

On the surface, this appears to be OpenAI expanding its product suite. But look closer, and you’ll see the emergence of what I’m calling “headless marketplaces”. A headless marketplace is a marketplace where the traditional user-facing interface (website/app) becomes decoupled from the core marketplace functions. Users are increasingly accessing marketplaces’ inventory through third-party AI interfaces (such as ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) rather than visiting the marketplace’s own website directly. As AI chat interfaces become the default browsing experiences, websites become increasingly less important. Even Google is saying the open web is dying.

This isn’t necessarily bad for marketplaces, but it certainly is a departure. What is true, though, is that AI companies are not going to be in the business of acquiring real-world supply. They want other companies to do it and integrate via the Apps SDK. It is too messy for them, at least for now.

Marketplaces address real-world complexity by aggregating supply and organizing the physical world into consumable structured data built for commerce. This creates a fascinating symbiosis: LLMs need marketplaces to make the supply “LLM legible”. Marketplaces need AI interfaces for next-generation demand aggregation.

The winners in this new era will likely excel at two critical capabilities:

1. Supply acquisition excellence - Aggregating comprehensive, real-world inventory that can’t just be scraped from the internet (replaceable labor and digital asset marketplaces will likely be negatively impacted)

2. LLM legibility - Structuring data super well so AI agents can easily parse, understand, and present it accurately to users

The marketplace game is evolving. Websites will matter less; your supply network and data infrastructure will matter more.

And a laugh (or two)!

For all the founders out there…

Make the insanity stop, ARR does not stand for annual run rate! 😆

📰 News

“OpenAI launches Jobs Platform and AI certifications to expand economic opportunity” - OpenAI announced a new talent marketplace connecting AI-savvy workers with employers, alongside free certifications spanning beginner to advanced AI skills. The OpenAI Jobs Platform positions the company as a potential competitor to LinkedIn, creating an interesting dynamic given Microsoft’s $13B investment in OpenAI. OpenAI

“Uber-backed Lime breaks 1 billion trip milestone” - The shared micromobility marketplace reached 1 billion total rides since launch, posting $686M in net revenue (up 30% YoY) and $810M in gross bookings in 2024 while achieving four consecutive years of double-digit growth. The company is preparing for a long-anticipated IPO with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan after attaining two years of positive free cash flow. Zag Daily

Faire targets $500M revenue in 2025 - The wholesale marketplace connecting independent retailers with brands is projecting to more than double its current ~$217M annual run rate, while recalibrating its internal valuation to $5B down from a 2022 peak of $12.6B. Previous funding includes $416M Series G in 2022. The Information

“Scale AI sues former employee and rival Mercor, alleging attempt to steal biggest customers” - Scale AI filed suit against ex-employee Eugene Ling and competing talent marketplace Mercor for allegedly stealing over 100 confidential documents containing customer strategies worth “millions of dollars.” TechCrunch

“X to open marketplace for dead and abandoned handles in next 30 days” - X’s Nikita Bier confirmed the platform will launch a marketplace allowing users to acquire inactive or abandoned usernames within the next month. The move could unlock value from dormant handles while creating a new revenue stream for the platform, though details on pricing, verification, and eligibility criteria remain unclear. It also hasn’t happened yet… X

“OpenTable launches all-in-one marketplace for private and group dining” - The restaurant reservation platform now enables diners to browse, compare, and instantly book private dining rooms and large group tables with transparent pricing and real-time availability. PR Newswire

“Kroger’s delivery expansion with DoorDash is bad news for Instacart, analysts say” - Kroger expanded its DoorDash partnership to all 2,700 stores nationwide, prompting Wedbush to downgrade Instacart to underperform as Kroger represents over 10% of Instacart’s gross transaction value. Instacart’s market share in grocery delivery has dropped from 70% in 2022 to 58% in 2024, and shares fell 6% on the news. MarketWatch

“Poshmark partners with Perplexity to offer free shipping promotion on Comet browser” - The resale marketplace teamed up with Perplexity AI to offer a limited one-time free shipping promotion for purchases made through the new Comet browser. The move comes as Poshmark also gains early access to Google’s new “Ask Stores” AI chat feature within Google Shopping. Value Added Resource

“Uber buys data labeling startup in push to sell AI services” - Uber acquired Belgian startup Segments.ai to strengthen its Uber AI Solutions division, which now sells data labeling services to external companies developing autonomous driving technologies. The Y Combinator-backed platform specializes in LiDAR and multi-sensor annotation for robotics and self-driving vehicles, helping Uber transition from using data labeling for its own operations to operating it as a marketplace connecting enterprises to global talent for AI training tasks. Bloomberg

“Pattern Group files for IPO showing revenue growth” - The e-commerce accelerator that resells brands’ products on marketplaces like Amazon filed for an estimated $400M IPO, disclosing $1.14B in revenue for H1 2025 (up 35% YoY) and net income of $47M. Bloomberg

“OnlyFans gross revenue rises 9% to $7.2 billion in 2024” - The creator platform reported $7.22B in gross revenue (fan payments to creators) for fiscal 2024, up 9% YoY, with net revenue of $1.41B and pre-tax profit of $684M. Growth has slowed significantly from the 118% spike in 2021 during COVID, though user metrics remain strong with creator accounts up 13% to 4.6M and fan accounts up 24% to 377.5M. Variety

“Amazon Autos launches in 48 US cities with Hyundai” - Customers can now browse, order, finance, and schedule pickup of new Hyundai vehicles from local dealers directly on Amazon, with transparent pricing and trade-in options, eliminating traditional negotiation. Amazon

“Airbnb’s Brian Chesky: AI Opens New Markets” - The Airbnb CEO discusses how AI is expanding what’s possible for their platform and allows them to do things like flights. Skift

“Live shopping app Palmstreet crosses 3 million order milestone” - The community-driven live shopping marketplace hit 3M orders in just two years, serving over 1M members across categories including rare plants, home decor, and collectibles. PR Newswire

“Bounce now has more locations than the top 3 hotel chains worldwide” - The luggage storage marketplace has surpassed 25,000 locations globally, exceeding Marriott, Hilton, and IHG combined. LinkedIn

“Highway buys freight marketplace to accelerate load board rollout” - Carrier identity verification provider Highway acquired Newtrul, a freight marketplace founded to compete with DAT and Truckstop.com, to expand its Trusted Freight Exchange (TFX). Journal of Commerce

“Fora acquires AI startup Legends” - The travel advisor marketplace Fora has acquired Legends to enhance its AI capabilities for travel planning and advisor support. Fun fact, I was Legends EIR when they were in Techstars! Fora

💰 Fundraising

Kalshi raises $300+ Million at $5B valuation; Polymarket secures up to $2B at $8B valuation - Kalshi’s funding came from Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, marking a 2.5x increase from just three months ago as the prediction marketplace scales to $50B in annualized trading volume (up from $300M last year) across 140 countries. Days earlier, rival Polymarket secured investment from NYSE owner Intercontinental Exchange at an $8B pre-money valuation—up from $1B just two months prior—highlighting the growth in prediction markets following last year’s presidential election. (TechCrunch)

Crew raises $3M Seed - The tech-enabled gig services platform for short-term rental owners secured funding to scale operations and help property managers streamline their STR management. Multifamily Executive

Rare Candy raises $3.6M Seed+ from Konvoy - The collector-first marketplace for Pokémon cards (expanding to Magic: The Gathering) has seen monthly active users grow 30x since last summer by integrating deep collector tools within the buying experience. (Yonder portfolio company) Konvoy VC

Quince raises $200M led by Iconiq Capital - The direct-to-consumer luxury brand is now valued at $4.5 billion (double its previous valuation). Quince sources materials directly from factories that produce for luxury brands to offer high-quality essentials at accessible prices. Built In SF

Goodship raises $25M led by Greenfield Partners - Ryan Soskin announced that the sustainable shipping marketplace has raised a significant Series A to expand its eco-friendly logistics platform. LinkedIn

Garage raises $13.5M Series A led by Infinity Ventures - The YC-backed marketplace helps firefighters and public safety departments buy specialized equipment, automating the typically manual process of purchasing fire trucks and other gear. TechCrunch

Micro1 raises $35M Series A led by 01 Advisors - The AI data labeling marketplace, which connects AI labs with specialized contractors, secured funding at a $500M valuation. Micro1 has grown to $50M gross revenue run rate from $7M earlier this year. TechCrunch

Mercor eyes Series C at $10B+ valuation - The AI training talent marketplace is approaching $450M in annualized run-rate revenue (up from $100M ARR in March) and already generated $6M in profit in H1. Previous $100M Series B in February at $2B valuation led by Felicis. TechCrunch

Novig raises $18M Series A led by Forerunner - The sports prediction marketplace has grown monthly trading volume nearly 100x since September, surpassing $2B in annualized volume, with over 90% of trades now peer-to-peer. Novig

📖 Reads

“The $1T Opportunity to Build the Next Amazon in Retail” - Sequoia analyzes eight historical technological transformations of retail and forecasts five ways AI could create the next trillion-dollar retail company. The piece argues AI’s superpower, analyzing complex questions and providing consultation, will enable new models in categories like home improvement, where customers arrive with problems rather than specific products in mind. Sequoia Capital

“AI is a Technology Shift, not a Platform Shift” - Sameer Singh argues that AI lacks the key characteristic of true platform shifts: a network effect between technology adoption and product builders. Unlike the internet (browsers) and mobile (smartphones) eras, where new distribution channels emerged, AI is missing this distribution component, meaning traditional acquisition channels must still carry AI innovation, at least until a new scalable distribution method emerges. Breadcrumb VC

“AI x Commerce” - a16z breaks down how AI will impact commerce across five purchase categories, from impulse buys to life purchases. The key insight: AI is initially targeting low-value informational queries, but Google retains high-monetization commerce searches for now. The middle three categories (lifestyle, functional, and routine purchases) are most vulnerable to AI disruption. At the same time, marketplaces like Amazon and Shopify remain well-positioned due to their integrated commerce stacks and proximity to the point of purchase. a16z

“When Agents Attack: How AI Collapses and Rebuilds Marketplace Moats” - Casey Winters delivers a must-read analysis on how AI agents will disrupt traditional marketplace economics by collapsing the marketing funnel, intermediating transactions, and integrating directly with supply—forcing founders to rethink CAC, deepen supply relationships, and potentially go agentic themselves. Casey Accidental

“The Liquidity Problem in Prediction Markets: Part 0” - Claims of mass adoption of prediction markets are overly optimistic when viewed through the lens of market makers, who provide liquidity in all major markets. Binary markets are frequently unhedgeable and suffer from adverse selection, creating a professional market maker’s nightmare that threatens mass adoption versus alternatives like perpetuals with unlimited leverage. The piece argues that without makers able to provide liquidity, prediction markets face fundamental challenges despite the hype around platforms like Polymarket, Kalshi, and Limitless. X

“How to Build (and Explain) Cohort Charts” - A practical guide to building the three most common cohort visualization types: range retention tables, spider charts, and stacked cohort area charts. The piece breaks down when to use gross retention versus net dollar retention based on your business model. Includes templates to recreate each chart type. Mostly Metrics

“Ryan Petersen on building Flexport” - An insightful interview with the Flexport founder covering the freight marketplace’s evolution and future. The Generalist

“OfferUp Recommerce Report 2025” - Comprehensive research showing 93% of Americans bought something secondhand in 2025, with Gen Z leading the charge as resale moves from niche to mainstream; the market is projected to reach $300B by 2030. Recommerce Report

“Capital Allocation: Part I” - Morgan Hughes breaks down why capital allocation is fundamentally about making hard tradeoff decisions with limited resources and imperfect information. The framework introduces “risk-adjusted investing” at the initiative level, showing how companies should evaluate 2-3 strategic priorities rather than diffusing capital across many projects—using confidence levels to discount expected returns and build a portfolio that maximizes growth without running out of cash.

Morgan Hughes

Capital Allocation: Part I

Part I: Core Principles for Capital Allocation…

Read more

7 months ago · 1 like · Morgan Hughes

📽 Watch or Listen

“How Stanley Tang Built DoorDash with Speed, Conviction & Chaos | The Library of Minds” (Delphi Podcast) - DoorDash co-founder Stanley Tang shares how doing things that don’t scale became the company’s most significant advantage, revealing that operational excellence, not software, defined their success. Tang discusses the tension between speed and quality, DoorDash’s darkest moments, and how conviction guided decisions like spending 40% of their cash to do what was right for the business.

“The Travel Giant Built on Billions of Reviews | Steve Kaufer on TripAdvisor” (Kleiner Perkins) - TripAdvisor co-founder Steve Kaufer breaks down how the company became the internet’s trusted travel companion with over a billion reviews. Kaufer shares why early personalization efforts fell short and how AI is finally replicating what travel agents once did—understanding travelers but faster, smarter, and at scale.

“Sleeping in Parking Lots to $250M+ Revenue: The Handshake Story” (The Peel with Turner Novak) - Handshake CEO Garrett Lord shares the scrappy origin story of building the three-sided marketplace connecting 18 million students, 1,600 universities, and a million employers; from maxing out his dad’s retirement account and sleeping in McDonald’s parking lots to scaling past $250M in revenue. Lord discusses the explosive growth of Handshake’s AI data labeling business, key marketplace KPIs, and how AI is reshaping the job market for Gen Z.

“Ryan Petersen: Building the Global Logistics Giant Flexport” (The Knowledge Project Podcast) - Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen breaks down the hidden economics of tariffs and why they backfire by pushing factories overseas while raising costs twice. Petersen shares how Flexport survived freight rate volatility, which ranged from $600 to $20,000 per container, the retention math that caps marketplace growth, and the operational playbook for managing complex logistics systems, including the story of flying 500 million masks on grounded passenger planes during the pandemic.

“Mercor CEO & Co-Founder, Brendan Foody: How They Grew from $1M to $500M in 17 Months” (20VC with Harry Stebbings) - Mercor CEO Brendan Foody shares how the AI talent marketplace scaled from $1M to $500M in revenue in just 17 months, making it the fastest-growing company in history and earning a rumored $10B valuation. Foody discusses how AI data providers differentiate in a crowded market, why evaluation benchmarks are problematic, the reality of revenue sustainability in AI companies, and his controversial stance that building a $10B company requires a 996 work culture.

“From Setback to Comeback: Joan Nguyen, Co-Founder of Bumo” (Behind Her Empire with Yasmin Nouri) - Bumo CEO Joan Nguyen shares how she built a nationwide childcare marketplace connecting families with thousands of licensed providers after raising over $10 million—despite pitching 200+ investors, losing her home in the LA wildfires, and pivoting to a virtual school in just eleven days during the pandemic. Nguyen discusses the challenges of scaling a three-sided marketplace in childcare, navigating survival mode versus thriving mode as a founder, and the resilience required to break through in a traditionally difficult category for venture funding.

Thanks for reading!

That is a wrap for the week! As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any feedback or news I missed. Hot tips are always welcome. Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you’d like to schedule a call, you can find me on expert marketplaces Hubble or Intro.

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About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a longtime advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he served as the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and has worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, JustAnswer, and the Federal Reserve.

Marketplaces are one of the greatest business models ever for VCs to back. But one of the hardest businesses to get early-stage funding for. I had to solve this problem.

After I helped scale Outdoorsy to $3B+ in gross revenue, helped raise $200M in funding across companies, worked with 50+ marketplaces, and created the largest marketplace newsletter with 4K subscribers, I kept running into the same problem: exceptional marketplace founders struggle to find investors who understand their business model and will back them early.

When we were fundraising for Outdoorsy — a low-frequency, high-value RV rental marketplace — we were fundamentally misunderstood. Investors kept comparing us to Airbnb and Uber or asking about our ARR.

"There will be crickets when you launch" - VCs

They were wrong. We scaled to $3B+ in RV rentals by writing our playbook and building one of the first SaaS-enabled marketplaces. That planted the seed for what would become Yonder's Marketplace+ thesis.

The experience opened my eyes to a massive gap in the market: there is no first-check/pre-seed fund built by marketplace operators, for marketplace operators.

So I started investing deal-by-deal (SPVs). But I quickly realized that to do this right, I needed to build something bigger.

Yonder Fund I was born to invest early in marketplaces that build new economies.

The Next Airbnb is Being Built Right Now

Since 2010, 50% of the top VC IPOs and 80% of the top 5 exits have been marketplaces. Airbnb, Uber, DoorDash, Instacart; these aren't outliers. They're the focus.

Leo Polvets at Susa Ventures summed it up perfectly in a tweet:

“There were about 2,000 seed rounds in 2008-2010. If you invested the same amount into every single seed round during that period, Airbnb by itself would give you a 3.5x fund (because it was a 7,000x outcome).”

Turns out Uber was also that year.

That's the power law in action for marketplaces. When they hit, they create generational companies.

Proving the Thesis

In the past three years, I've put together $4.5M in AUM across 36 investments (Angel, SPV, and Fund), including early checks into exciting companies like Autopilot ($13M ARR, $800M AUM, Craft), Packsmith (Bessemer, Interplay, Trust Fund), Throne (Moxxie, Long Journey, Lance Armstrong), and Howie AI.

“Our experience with Colin as an investor has been exceptional. His strategic introductions have significantly broadened our investor network, and his valuable feedback has been essential in enhancing our product.” Brian Schardt - Co-Founder/CEO of Autopilot

For now, I'm keeping the fund portfolio quiet, but I look forward to sharing more soon!

The fund has been very active while operating under the radar, and the early results are promising:

• 14 investments completed before or alongside Founders Fund, Norwest Venture Partners, Lerer Hippeau, Seven Seven Six, Mucker, Precursor, Hustle Fund, Night Capital, Motivate, Slauson & Co., m]x[v, Boost VC, Flex Capital, Unusal Ventures, m]x[v, SNAK, ANIMO, Ritual Capital, Coughdrop Capital, Superangel.VC, Mu Ventures, and more!

• 2/3 of companies graduated to their next round (2024 cohort)

• World-class LPs, including founders from Grubhub/Seamless, ACV Auctions, Mercari, OLX/FJ Labs, Avail, Rematter, and operators from Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, DoorDash, eBay, Thumbtack, StubHub, OpenTable, Trulia, Zillow, Stripe, Pinterest, RetailMeNot, Whatnot, Turo, Outdoorsy, Peerspace, and many other marketplaces.

“I’m an LP in 70 funds, Colin is in the top 5. Operators hearts with an investor's mind.” - Jack Greco Co-Founder of ACV Auctions

Building generational companies is a long game, but according to Carta, the fund has an early top decile trajectory based on the current markups.

The thesis is proving out. The flywheel is spinning.

Why This Matters

Being a first-check investor means that you have to add way more value than just your check. I'm the operator who's been in the trenches building and fundraising, writing the largest marketplace newsletter, advising 50+ companies, and seeing the early patterns of what makes a marketplace successful.

When founders pitch me, I don't just understand their unit economics; I've lived through the same liquidity challenges, the same chicken-and-egg problems, the same scaling nightmares they're facing.

That's the difference between operator-led investing and traditional VC: I've built what they're building. It gives me the opportunity to be the first call and check for exceptional founders. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

“Colin was one of our first checks. At the time, we were building a healthcare staffing marketplace. Just weeks after the round closed, we made the tough call to pivot—radically—to smart toilets. Colin didn’t hesitate. He was steady, supportive, and asked the right questions. In a sea of investors who claim to be founder-friendly, Colin proves it when it counts.” - Scott Hickle Founder/CEO of Throne

Why Now?

The time is now, and the future belongs to AI-native marketplaces, and they are being built as we speak.

Marketplaces are uniquely positioned to benefit from AI, as it is the key to a new marketplace model in which the heavy lifting of aggregation, matching, and decision-making is no longer human-driven but agent-led.

AI is completely changing the game. Just look at Mercor, the AI recruiting marketplace that went from a $250M Series A valuation to a $2B Series B valuation in less than a year while growing 6,400% year-over-year. These AI-native marketplaces aren't just growing fast; they're redefining what's possible.

The Cambrian explosion is happening, and there are so many great founders to invest in right now, and I am going to need a bigger fund!

To invest in more of these companies, I am reopening and increasing my initial, fully subscribed proof-of-concept fund.

If you are interested in being an LP, please reach out to me at colin@yonder.vc or submit your interest here. It will be open for a limited time to increase the size of the fund and invest in 50+ companies.

If you're building a marketplace, I want to meet you: I'm writing $50-200K checks at first-check and pre-seed. Let's create the next generation of marketplaces together!

The Best for Last

I am deeply grateful for the 4,000+ Take Rate readers who've built this community, to the LPs who believed in the vision before I even had a website, to the founders who trusted me with their first institutional check. I would be nothing without you! 🙏

Special thank you to my wife and family for all of their support.

To Jack Greco for convincing me to do this and for being my first check.

To Sydecar for being a steady partner in the background, which makes running a fund so much easier for emerging managers.

To help spread the word, I would be forever grateful if you could like, comment, or re-post my announcement!

Help Share my Announcement on LinkedIn

About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a longtime advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he served as the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and has worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, JustAnswer, and the Federal Reserve.

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👋 Welcome to the 14th edition of the Marketplace Memo. My goal is to share curated news, content, and stories related to marketplaces, along with a splash of my own color. Please enjoy and share with others!

Excited to feature a product from the Take Rate community!

Novi – Validate ideas before you build

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AI is the Supply Vibes:

I'm finally sending this out after welcoming a new addition to the family! While I haven't been able to sleep as much as I'd like, I have been able to utilize my struggling brain cells digitally with an AI version of myself.

The best part?

It doesn't need coffee, doesn't complain about diaper duty, and can work around the clock without demanding a raise. If you'd like to try out Colin AI, visit this link and ask it some questions. I am actively working to improve answers on the backend. The AI agent is by SuperMe, courtesy of Casey Winters and Ludo Antonov, who have built a very cool marketplace where users can access AI agent versions of their favorite experts.

Here's the fun part: time is finite, but what if it wasn't?

If we can extend ourselves digitally and let that extension help others, we suddenly become more productive without actually working more hours. I'm excited about this because it's peak "only AI can do this" territory, and it's genuinely the first time we're seeing AI become the actual labor supply; not just facilitating the handshake between buyer and seller, but being what gets bought and sold. This feeds perfectly into what we covered in the last memo: the best marketplaces don't just organize existing supply; they conjure entirely new supply out of thin air (or, in this case, out of podcast transcripts and blog posts).

However, here's where the rubber meets the road: answering questions effectively is a challenging task. There's a universe of knowledge rattling around in every expert's head that never makes it to the internet; all those offhand insights from coffee chats, random shower thoughts, and "well, actually..." moments.

I think the fact of the matter is that most experts aren’t writing down or saying what they think is obvious most of the time, which means that there is a lot of basic scaffolding of ideas that isn’t well-documented. It appears that a practical approach is to have an expert write or speak at length on core concepts to train the agent.

We're definitely in the first innings here, as companies like SuperMe and Delphi figure out this "rent-an-expert-brain" business model. I am excited to have a front-row seat for the agent-led marketplace evolution, where AI stops being a tool and starts being the supply.

The most frequent question topic hitting my AI agent? How to scale the demand side of a marketplace. Plus, some of these funny ones:

• Can you give me a complete download of your brain?

• What is your opinion of the current Bitcoin price?

• Are you old?

• What’s Colin’s biggest secret?

🔥 The Highlight

The Agent marketplace wars are here…

AWS launched its AI Agent Marketplace on July 15th, featuring over 900 agents from established companies such as Anthropic, IBM, Salesforce, and PwC (I previously covered this in Marketplace Memo #8). It's the latest move in what's becoming a proper platform war. Google launched its own in April, Microsoft rolled out its Agent Store in May, and OpenAI just escalated things with ChatGPT, which can browse the web and perform tasks on your behalf. Meanwhile, consumer platforms like Poe have been quietly building agent ecosystems with millions of user-created bots across multiple AI models. Everyone is racing to become the "app store for AI agents" because they know that whoever controls distribution controls the game.

The enterprise adoption story is messier than the hype suggests. Only 15% of executives are considering AI agent deployment because it turns out CFOs aren't thrilled about autonomous systems that might go rogue. AWS is betting its "one-stop shop" approach (agents, guardrails, and infrastructure bundled together) will win over cautious enterprises. With Amazon's $13.8 billion bet on Anthropic and everyone from startups to tech giants scrambling for marketplace real estate, we're witnessing the infrastructure layer of AI land grabs happen in real-time. The winner doesn't just receive a revenue share; they also get to define how businesses interact with AI for the next decade.

📰 News

"Opendoor stock records 180% weekly gain as retail frenzy cements meme status" - The iBuyer marketplace platform surged 188% after hedge fund manager Eric Jackson (who called Carvana's comeback) posted a bull thesis targeting $82/share, triggering retail meme stock mania despite the company facing delisting warnings and never achieving positive EBITDA. Yahoo Finance

“BREAKING: Polymarket has acquired QCEX for $112M. The deal will allow Polymarket to launch in the US 🇺🇸” - TBPN

"Swimply founder returns as CEO, company hits profitability in 4 months and partners with Disney" - Pool-sharing marketplace founder Bunim Laskin returned as CEO alongside original co-founder Abe Saiovici, achieving profitability within four months while launching 10 new features including Swimply Premium, Pets, Luxe, and Memberships across their platform, serving 4+ million guests in three countries. Swimply also launched a partnership with Disney. LinkedIn

"OpenSea acquires Rally wallet to bolster mobile and token trading push" - The NFT marketplace's acquisition of mobile-first crypto wallet Rally signals a significant move toward becoming a unified on-chain trading platform, with Rally's CEO Chris Maddern becoming OpenSea's new CTO. The Block

"Turo welcomes Kyte's customers" - Turo acquired select assets from car rental platform Kyte, adding to their 1.5 billion cars mission as the peer-to-peer mobility space continues consolidating around scale leaders. Turo

"Beehiiv surpasses $20M ARR just 3.5 years after launch" - Newsletter platform Beehiiv hit $20M ARR (plus additional ~$10M from their Ad Network and Boosts marketplace features), demonstrating how SaaS eventually evolves beyond subscriptions into multi-sided marketplace models. X

"Outdoorsy cuts half of product team in layoffs" - The RV rental marketplace laid off approximately 50% of its product organization along with cuts across other departments. LinkedIn

"Exclusive: Lovevery launches secondhand 'Pre-loved' marketplace for popular toys" - Lovevery partnered with Archive to launch a peer-to-peer secondhand marketplace, capitalizing on their toys' 70% resale value and targeting the gap between their 5 million social followers and 650,000 customers. Modern Retail

"This past holiday weekend, over 50,000 people recharged and reconnected at one of ResortPass' 2,000+ partner properties" - ResortPass continues scaling their day-pass marketplace model, demonstrating strong holiday weekend demand for their hotel amenity access platform without overnight stays. LinkedIn

"Our Farms launches curated online market featuring farm-raised foods" - Farm-to-consumer marketplace Our Farms launched with over 1,000 farmer-owned products, targeting the $150B+ opportunity to connect consumers directly with sustainable agriculture through their "Verified Farmer-Owned" certification program. Grocery Dive

"The Bezel Report: 2025 H1 Watch Market Trends & Insights" - Watch marketplace Bezel released comprehensive market data showing 27% rejection rate for inauthentic listings (38% valued over $10k), Rolex maintaining 37% of wants/33% of sales, and stainless steel extending dominance to 72% of transactions amid Swiss tariff impacts and social media-driven collecting trends. Bezel

"Introducing CNaught's MCP Server: Access Your Climate Data Directly from AI Tools" - Carbon credit marketplace CNaught launched a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server enabling users to access their carbon credit portfolio data, run emissions calculations, and generate impact reports directly through AI tools like Claude and Cursor via natural language queries. CNaught

💰 Fundraising

Alloy raises $1.5M Seed+ led by 11 Tribes, with participation from Hustle Fund, Ben Franklin Technology Partners, and Park Rangers Capital - The precious metals exchange marketplace provides consumers with accurate, upfront payout estimates and secure transactions for selling precious metals. Alloy

TruckParkingClub raises strategic investment from CAT Scale Company - Marketplace connecting truckers with reservable parking spaces across 2,323 locations nationwide, aiming to reduce driver search time from 56 minutes to under 10 minutes per day. LinkedIn

Sitch raises $5M Seed led by M13 and a16z Speedrun - AI-powered matchmaking app that combines human expertise with AI to connect singles through personalized matches and curated first dates. M13 and Founder Announcement

AirGarage raises $23M Series B led by Headline - Parking management platform that replaces traditional parking operations with a unified, data-rich operating system for real estate owners. AirGarage and Founder Announcement

Bumo raises $10M Seed led by True Ventures and Offline Ventures - An on-demand childcare marketplace connecting parents with vetted providers for flexible booking of camps, full-time, part-time, and backup care services. Business Wire and Founder Announcement

Gone raises $6.3M Seed led by FUSE - Local reuse marketplace that offers free pickup of unwanted goods and resells them through multiple channels, including their store and other platforms. Nick Huzar, a Co-Founder of OfferUp, has joined as Chairman. GeekWire

FlyGuys raises $13M Series A-1 led by Kevin O'Leary's Wonder Fund - Reality data platform connecting enterprises with a network of 16,000+ FAA-certified drone pilots for AI-ready data collection across industries. Yahoo Finance

📖 Reads

"How Generative AI Adds Value to the Future of Work" - Upwork's research reveals that AI is simultaneously displacing low-value work while enhancing high-value work across all categories, with new skill categories, such as"AI content creator", emerging on their platform. The displacement-reinstatement dynamic is happening faster than expected, creating both challenges and opportunities for marketplace operators. Upwork Research

"Apps are Dying. Agents are Buying." - Simon Taylor argues that AI agents are transforming commerce by dissolving apps into "liquid software" and making checkout processes invisible, with platforms like Perplexity's Comet browser turning three separate shopping apps into a single conversation. Fintech Brainfood

"Investing in Growth" - Former Grubhub, Airbnb, and Cambly finance leader Morgan Hughes applies game theory to the classic question of "how much should we spend on growth," arguing that companies should invest aggressively in sales/marketing as long as it creates sufficient value to either bootstrap with free cash flow or raise more capital. Morgan Hughes

"Multi-Billion Startup Back Market Is Turning Tech Trash into Gold" - Back Market has reached $5.7 billion valuation by creating a dedicated marketplace for refurbished tech that separates itself from generic "used" goods on eBay and Amazon, processing 30 million orders and preventing over a million metric tons of carbon emissions. The company's success highlights how vertical marketplaces can capture massive value by solving trust and quality issues in previously fragmented resale markets. Inc.com

"Local Circularity Could Unlock Trillions in Value" - OfferUp co-founder Nick Huzar outlines his vision for unlocking massive local value through three key ingredients: robust local marketplaces (OfferUp), scalable AI-enabled logistics (Gone), and autonomous EV delivery networks (Juicer Energy). LinkedIn

"Leland: $10,000,000+/yr coaching marketplace playbook" - Deep dive into how Leland grew from 50 MBA admission coaches to an 8-figure coaching marketplace by starting impossibly narrow and expanding strategically along customer journeys. Consumer Startups

"THE NETWORK EFFECT — IN THE REAL WORLD." - LinkedIn post from construction rental marketplace Downstream showing the growing network effect as they expand with contractors to new projects. LinkedIn

"Winning the AI Era: How Hotels Can Break Free from OTA Dependence" - Post from Steve Kaufer (CEO of TripAdvisor) and others that argues that AI's shift toward answer-driven search creates a generational opportunity for hotels to bypass OTA oligopolies through direct booking relationships. The piece outlines how Model Context Protocol (MCP) could enable AI systems to surface hotel-direct offers that OTAs can't match. DirectBooker

"FJ Labs Q2 2025 Update" - Fabrice Grinda's quarterly update highlights AI's transformative impact on marketplaces, featuring portfolio company wins like Clutch surpassing C$1B in vehicle purchases and Palmstreet raising $25M for its livestream shopping platform. Fabrice Grinda

"The Heath Ledger guide to AI" - This unconventional take argues that AI's real impact comes not from task automation but from reducing coordination costs between people and organizations. The piece draws parallels to shipping containers, suggesting that AI's transformative power lies in enabling new forms of economic coordination rather than just replacing individual jobs. Platforms

"The False-Positive Incumbent" - NFX argues that many AI companies masquerading as market leaders are actually "false-positive incumbents" with unsustainable unit economics masked by hype-driven demand. The framework helps identify which "unicorns" are building real moats versus those optimizing for fundraising theater. NFX

"Meet the SNAK Machine (Beta)" - Snak VC has made their internal marketplace analytics tool publicly available, turning raw transaction data into buyer/seller cohort analysis and benchmarking insights for founders. Give it a spin! Snak VC

"The Case for a Vertical API Layer in Your B2B Marketplace" - B2B marketplaces are evolving beyond matching platforms by building APIs that embed them into customers' daily workflows, from Faire's Shopify integrations to Flexport's freight management APIs. The strategic insight: APIs transform marketplaces from occasional-use platforms into deeply embedded tools. This is the marketplace+ model in action. Snak VC

📽️ Watch or Listen

"May I Have Your Retention Please Podcast Episode 1" - This interview with Saba Karim and SideShift co-founder Drew Levinn breaks down how their Gen Z creator marketplace climbed to the top 50 on the App Store through creative growth tactics like TikTok content and strategic cold outreach, ultimately scaling to 45k monthly downloads before strategically pausing marketing.

"How Claude Is Building A Unique Growth Engine Out of User-Created Apps" - Brian Balfour breaks down how Anthropic's Claude AI-powered apps create a novel content loop where users build no-code applications that others must authenticate with Claude to use, driving both user acquisition and subscription upgrades. The model flips traditional platform constraints into advantages by offering free hosting and eliminating API costs for creators, while capturing user growth through mandatory authentication; creating "nested loops" where each app becomes its distribution channel for Claude. Brian Balfour

"Everything Marketplaces Group Chat #192 with Mike Ghaffary (Burst Capital)" - Burst Capital GP Mike Ghaffary shares his operator-turned-investor perspective on evaluating marketplaces, the impact of AI agents on platforms, and practical fundraising benchmarks for early-stage founders. His updated marketplace checklist and insights on current growth rate expectations make this particularly valuable for founders navigating today's funding environment.

Marketplace Jobs

• Director of Product, Marketplace (Propel)

• Controller (Neighbor)

• Principal Product Manager, Customer Growth (Redfin)

• Category Manager, Collectible Toys (eBay)

• Category Manager, Comics (eBay)

• Manager, Drivers (VAMO)

• Senior Product Manager (Ghost)

• Senior Software Engineer (CharterUP)

• Senior Product Designer - New Bets (DoorDash)

• Creative Director (ResortPass)

• Paid Search Manager (ResortPass)

Would you like to see your job listed here? Email colin@yonder.vc with the subject line “Job Posting” to be included or get your job featured!

Thanks for reading!

That is a wrap for the week! As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any feedback or news I missed. Hot tips are always welcome. Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you'd like to schedule a call, you can find me on expert marketplaces Hubble or Intro.

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About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a longtime advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he served as the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and has worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, JustAnswer, and the Federal Reserve. 

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👋 Welcome to the 13th edition of the Marketplace Memo. My goal is to share curated news, content, and stories related to marketplaces, along with a splash of my own color. Please enjoy and share with others!

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😎 Market Making Vibes:

The biggest marketplaces don't just facilitate transactions; they create entirely new economic categories. Market-making beats market-taking every time because you're not competing for a slice of an existing pie; you're baking a whole new cake.

That’s exactly why I started Yonder: to back marketplaces that create new economies.

So, let’s talk about baking a cake… 🎂

Brendan Foody, the CEO of Mercor, recently shared the following tweet/xeet:

What Mercor is experiencing/doing is market making; it's the birth of an entirely new market category within its labor marketplace. AI agents are becoming so proficient through RL (reinforcement learning) that the hard part now is designing the proper tests (or “evals”) to determine if they’re performing the job well. Companies are rushing to define these tests across every workflow, which is creating a new category of work: AI evaluation labor. Companies suddenly need domain experts to help teach AI what “good” looks like in their world.

However, here's the crucial insight: you must be "in market" to capture this opportunity. Mercor didn't pivot into AI talent; they were already there when the demand exploded. The Overton Window for AI workers only recently opened, and being positioned in the talent marketplace space meant Mercor could ride the wave instead of chasing it. Timing beats strategy, but you can't time what you're not already doing.

This is where marketplace magic happens. Unlike traditional "market-taking" marketplaces that extract value from existing transactions (and tend to be weaker businesses in the long term), the best marketplaces are market makers. They create entirely new classes of supply and entirely new demand curves. That’s the difference between market taking and market making.

In addition to labor, AI-native marketplaces, in particular, are opening entirely new frontiers of supply and demand.

🔥 The Highlight

"Content Independence Day: no AI crawl without compensation!"

Cloudflare just dropped the hammer on AI freeloaders, blocking crawlers by default unless they pay up through their new "Pay Per Crawl" feature. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince summarizes the impetus for change below:

With Cloudflare powering 19.5% of all websites, this isn't just a policy change; it's a market disruption. For years, web scraping has been a textbook example of the tragedy of the commons: unlimited access to shared content leads to overuse and undercompensation. Cloudflare is essentially creating more explicit property rights where none existed. This market making in action!

The company announced this about nine months ago, and at the time, I shared my thoughts:

The second-order effect is a shift in content economics: valuable sources will finally command market rates, and the incentive to create valuable content should increase. Until now, the bottleneck wasn’t just that agents couldn’t pay. No one was gatekeeping or providing a way to transact. Cloudflare is building for a world where agents have budgets and can act economically. Today’s agents are freeloaders. Tomorrow’s will make real-time tradeoffs, such as deciding whether a $20 report is worth it or if a free version is good enough. We’re watching the internet evolve from a digital commons into a marketplace where every piece of information is assigned a market value.

Read how Pay Per Crawl works here.

📰 News

"Travis Kalanick is trying to buy Pony AI — and Uber might help" - Uber's founder is working to acquire the US arm of the $4.5B Chinese autonomous vehicle company, potentially returning to mobility eight years after his departure while continuing to run ghost kitchen marketplace CloudKitchens. TechCrunch

"Bumble CEO criticizes staff for 'freaking out' over major layoffs" - Whitney Wolfe Herd told employees that "dating apps are feeling like a thing of the past" while announcing 240 job cuts (30% of the workforce), warning that Bumble might collapse without drastic measures and shifting operations from London to the US. Financial Times

"Building your storefront AI agent just got easier" - Shopify launched a direct connection between its Storefront MCP server and OpenAI's Responses API, enabling AI agents to search products, add items to cart, and create checkout links without authentication requirements. X

Mercor received preemptive offers at up to $10B valuation - The AI labor marketplace is growing quickly and receiving preemptive funding offers. The company has declined them, citing profitability. X

"Alibaba to merge food delivery, travel agency platforms into core E-commerce business" - Alibaba is consolidating Ele.me food delivery and Fliggy travel platforms into its main e-commerce unit, streamlining operations as Chinese platforms battle over "instant retail" with 30-60 minute delivery times. Everyone continues to chase the elusive super-app to rule them all. Yahoo Finance

"PartsSource, Leading Healthcare Services Online Marketplace, to be Acquired by Bain Capital Private Equity" - Bain Capital acquired the B2B medical equipment parts marketplace for $1.25 billion, reflecting continued PE interest in vertical marketplaces transforming traditional supply chains. Bain Capital

"SeatGeek launches 'Beyond the Seat' dynamic shopping experience" - The ticketing marketplace introduced features showing venue experiences with rich visuals and premium options side-by-side, addressing the challenge that 40% of sports fans can't find premium tickets confidently. Seat Geek

"New Shopper Rewards Card Will Offer Fast, Free Payouts & Cashback on Gas" - Instacart launched a Mastercard debit card powered by Branch for its gig workers, offering free instant payouts and gas cashback as platforms compete to retain talent in the creator economy. Instacart

"Pre-IPO Marketplace Hiive Eyes Funding as Competition Rises" - In Marketplace Memo #12, I shared a Bloomberg article stating that Hiive was in the market for fundraising. The CEO has clarified the situation.👇 LinkedIn

"NYSE welcomes Forge Global to celebrate the launch of its Next Generation Marketplace" - The legacy Hiive competitor appears to be trying their hand at a marketplace approach vs. the traditional brokerage model. LinkedIn

"Milestone unlocked: $1 Billion in cars purchased!" - Clutch COO Stephen Seibel announced the Canadian auto marketplace has reached $1.07B in total vehicle purchases, with $5.6B in AI-generated offers weekly and the fastest YTD growth in company history since launching in 2017. LinkedIn

"Indeed CEO Chris Hyams resigns, hands reins over to former chief Hisayuki Idekoba" - The job marketplace's CEO stepped down to focus on AI ethics, with the CEO of parent company Recruit returning to lead Indeed as it develops new AI-powered hiring tools. TechCrunch

"Amazon CEO Says AI Will Reduce Number of Corporate Jobs" - Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees that AI will "reduce our total corporate workforce" in the coming years as the company automates routine tasks, signaling how marketplace leaders view AI's impact on operations. Microsoft also just announced layoffs with the same sentiment. Wall Street Journal

💰 Fundraising

Polymarket is reported to be raising $200M at a $1B+ valuation led by Founders Fund - Polymarket is a blockchain-based prediction platform that gained massive visibility during the 2024 U.S. election and recently partnered with Elon Musk's X platform despite being banned from U.S. users since 2022. The Information

Kalshi raises $185M at a $2B valuation led by Paradigm - Kalshi is also a prediction market, but unlike rival Polymarket, Kalshi operates legally in the U.S. after reaching an agreement with the CFTC, making it the only regulated prediction market serving American users. TechCrunch

OpenRouter raises $40M in back-to-back Seed and Series A led by a16z and Menlo Ventures - OpenRouter, co-founded by former OpenSea CTO Alex Atallah, is a marketplace for routing large language models. The startup acts as a "one-stop shop" for developers to access multiple AI models through a single API. The company has surpassed $100M in GMV, a 10x increase in 7 months. Wall Street Journal | LinkedIn

General Medicine launches and raises $32M led by Matrix Partners - PillPack founders TJ Parker and Elliot Cohen left Amazon in 2022, four years after Amazon acquired PillPack for about $750 million. General Medicine was founded in 2023, began serving patients in 2025, and launched broadly this month. The new healthcare marketplace aims to make medical care "as easy as shopping online". CNBC

Alta raises $11M Seed Round led by Menlo Ventures — Founded by Jenny Wang, the AI stylist and personal shopping platform creates outfit recommendations using virtual avatars. TechCrunch

Delphi raises $16M Series A from Sequoia with participation from Menlo Ventures and Anthropic's Anthology Fund - Delphi creates AI digital minds to help people scale communication. The platform enables experts and creators to build authenticated digital versions of themselves that can engage in conversations 24/7. Delphi

📖 Reads

"Vampire Attacks: How Marketplaces Overcome the Chicken-and-Egg Problem" - My latest article about the chicken or the egg growth strategy that helped launch marketplaces like Airbnb, Uber, and Thumbtack by pulling users from established platforms like Craigslist, Indeed, and others. Take Rate

Olivia Moore on the "Rich Person Paradox" - a16z's Olivia Moore highlights a “brutal” insight about repeat founders in consumer: success can disconnect you from your target audience's real constraints and tradeoffs. As the adage goes, necessity is the mother of invention. X

"The Next Great Distribution Shift" - Every platform follows the same pattern: identify a moat, open the gates, and close for monetization. Brian Balfour argues that we're living through a massive technology shift without the corresponding distribution shift. Still, AI platforms like ChatGPT represent the next great opportunity window for early movers as the door closes on established platforms like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Brian Balfour

"When Growth Plateaus: How and When to Layer on New Acquisition Channels" - Growth starts to plateau, and no amount of optimization seems to fix the problem. You need a bigger bet on new products, M&A, or channels. Casey Winters breaks down when to layer on new acquisition channels and why most startups get the timing wrong. The key insight: your first channel was optimal for a reason, so new channels only work when your economics or product has fundamentally changed. Casey Accidental

"Ghost's Network Effect" - Ghost CEODee Murthy explains how they're building network data effects on top of traditional network effects by collecting "the best pricing and demand data in the industry" to match supply with demand more effectively than competitors. This is the difference between aggregating users and building proprietary intelligence that compounds faster than network size alone. LinkedIn

"Booking: The $170B+ A/B Testing Machine" - How A/B testing turned two Priceline acquisitions (totaling $294m) into the world's most valuable travel company with a $170B+ market cap. Trung Phan delves into how Booking Holdings has mastered the art of continuous experimentation to dominate the online travel industry. SatPost by Trung Phan

"First Class Second Hand: The Recommerce Cheatsheet" - A deep dive by Bas Rieter of DFF into the ingredients needed to build successful re-commerce marketplaces, from authentication and logistics to pricing strategies and customer experience. The piece breaks down how re-commerce differs from traditional e-commerce and what founders need to consider when entering this rapidly growing market. Medium

"#23 Re-Marketing: The Most Overlooked Growth Lever in Marketplaces" - Most marketplace founders obsess over supply and demand acquisition but ignore dormant users who are paused and often need the right context to re-engage. This framework for re-marketing includes 10 tactical examples for reactivating users who've already paid the CAC. Snak VC

"The State of AI in 2025" - Iconiq Capital's comprehensive report on AI trends, adoption patterns, and strategic implications for businesses navigating the current AI landscape. Essential reading for understanding where AI investments are heading and how marketplaces can leverage these emerging capabilities. Iconiq Capital

📽️ Watch or Listen

"The Secret to Winning a Two-Sided Marketplace" - Brian McMahon from Pickle shares how they cracked the chicken-and-egg problem by targeting local influencers who both supply and rent fashion items. The discussion on using AI for everything from product tagging to dispute resolution offers a glimpse into how modern marketplaces can scale operations without scaling headcount.

"How a $500 TV Ad Turned Credit Karma into a $7B Empire | Ep. 2 The NFX Podcast" - Credit Karma's founder, Ken Lin, breaks down how a scrappy $500 DIY TV commercial became the growth hack that scaled them from near-bankruptcy to a $7.1 billion acquisition by Intuit. His insights on navigating the razor's edge between growth and survival, as well as his reasoning for choosing M&A over IPO, offer valuable lessons for marketplace founders.

"Learnings From Starting & Scaling Reverb To A $275M Acquisition With David Kalt | EM Group Chat #191" - Reverb founder David Kalt shares how he built the "eBay for musicians" from a guitar store owner's frustration into a $275 million acquisition by Etsy, and now applies those lessons as CEO of PangoBooks, a leading used book marketplace. His insights on building structured product catalogs, authentication strategies, and balancing individual sellers versus resellers offer tactical advice for marketplace founders navigating similar challenges across different verticals.

"Bezel Disrupting the Luxury Re-Sale Watch Market" - Founded in 2022, the luxury watch marketplace Bezel has raised funding from notable investors, including Kevin Hart, John Legend, and Michael Ovitz, while targeting the $20 billion secondary watch market with in-house authentication. Bloomberg

Marketplace Jobs

• Senior Manager, Marketplace, Chief of Staff Strategy & Operations (DoorDash)

• Growth Marketing Manager, Paid Social (Berry Street)

• Marketplace Operations Associate (Bubble Goods)

• Director of HQ Operations (Alloy)

• Staff Software Engineer (CharterUP)

• Principal Software Engineer (CharterUP)

• Staff Product Manager (Ghost)

• Senior Software Engineer (Clutch)

• Vice President, Brand Marketing (offe market)

• Founding Product Designer (rejigg)

• Sales Representative (Whop)

Would you like to see your job listed here? Email colin@yonder.vc with the subject line “Job Posting” to be included or get your job featured!

Thanks for reading!

That is a wrap for the week! As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any feedback or news I missed. Hot tips are always welcome. Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you'd like to schedule a call, you can find me on expert marketplaces Hubble or Intro.

Share

About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a longtime advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he served as the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and has worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, JustAnswer, and the Federal Reserve. 

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Beware of Vampires

It seemed like no one saw DeepSeek coming. One day, OpenAI dominated the AI landscape with GPT-4 and ChatGPT. The next day, a relatively unknown Chinese startup released a model that matched GPT-4's performance while costing a fraction of the price to run. Within hours, millions of users were switching to the cheaper alternative.

How did a newcomer with no brand recognition suddenly steal market share from the most valuable AI company in the world? They executed a classic vampire attack. Instead of building from scratch, DeepSeek drew on OpenAI's creation and allegedly trained their model using ChatGPT's outputs, essentially draining billions of dollars worth of R&D investment, then open-sourcing the result at a dramatically lower cost.

Pure digital vampirism. 🧛

This explosive growth isn't just an AI story. It's the same vampire attack playbook that helped launch Airbnb, Uber, and other billion-dollar marketplaces.

Would You Like a Chicken or an Egg?

Every marketplace founder faces the same existential question at launch: "How do I get my first users when neither side will join without the other?" It's the classic chicken-and-egg problem that has killed countless marketplace startups.

The traditional advice?

Focus on one side first (usually the supply side), subsidize early users, and gradually build liquidity in one geographic area before expanding. - Every person citing the Uber playbook

But what if I told you there's a more aggressive approach that has launched some of the world's most successful marketplaces?

Enter the Vampire Attack: a growth strategy where a new marketplace deliberately siphons users (supply, demand, or both) from an established platform. After all, one platform's disintermediation risk is another platform's acquisition strategy.

Sound predatory? Maybe. Sometimes platforms want others to rely on them, as it enhances their network effect. Google, in particular, wanted users and companies to become dependent on them to empower their network effect (and sell ads). This symbiotic value exchange is just one type of vampire attack, but it also has downside risk for the vampire who becomes dependent on the host. At any time, the platform can cut you off, and that is what we call “platform risk”.

The overall vampire strategy is extraordinarily effective when executed well as a bootstrapping strategy. It's important to note that vampire attacks typically serve as initial growth accelerants rather than sustainable long-term growth strategies. They help you overcome the cold-start problem, but you'll eventually need to develop independent and durable acquisition channels.

The most important concept underlying the vampire attack is that being early to platform shifts is a critical growth lever.

Throughout tech history, companies that recognized emerging platforms and moved quickly to leverage them have gained tremendous advantages. From Zynga capitalizing on Facebook's social graph to countless apps utilizing Twitter's API in its early days, these platform opportunities create windows for rapid growth that eventually close.

Brian Balfour has just written a thought-provoking piece on the distinction between technology shifts and distribution shifts, which effectively describes this phenomenon. As a company, you want to be among the first to the platform shift when the gates open and before the platform captures the economic surplus. Vampire Attacks represent the ability to capture that economic surplus on platforms that haven't fully closed (or can't fully close).

Today, the rise of AI platforms like OpenAI represents another massive opportunity for forward-thinking marketplace entrepreneurs. It's telling that among OpenAI's initial Operator partners were Uber, Airbnb, and Thumbtack, three marketplaces that themselves employed vampire attacks to achieve their initial scale. These marketplace veterans recognize the power of being first to leverage new platform opportunities.

The Vampire Playbook

At its core, a vampire attack involves identifying where your potential users already congregate and then creating mechanisms to attract them to your platform, sometimes by leveraging the platform's existing infrastructure.

Platform Architecture Vulnerabilities: The most vulnerable targets fall into two categories:

1. Horizontal platforms, such as Craigslist, are vulnerable to vertical attacks. When you try to serve everyone, you serve no one exceptionally well. Each category within a horizontal platform represents a potential vampire opportunity for a focused vertical player that can deliver a 10x better experience or segment out the highest-frequency use cases.

2. Like-for-like platforms: Direct competitors with similar business models are susceptible to pure incentive and poaching attacks. If your value proposition is essentially identical to that of an incumbent, token rewards, better economics, or superior user experience can quickly win over users.

“One should expect only a handful of the dozens of services hoping to disrupt Craigslist or eBay or Amazon to survive, because of fantastic user experience or a high frequency of use.” - Casey Winters, The Contradictory Nature of Mobile Unbundling and the Emergence of Niche Marketplaces

The “attack” typically follows one of these patterns:

1. Symbiotic Mode: Build integrations that leverage another platform's reach while adding value to both ecosystems

2. Incentive Mode: Offer financial rewards to users who switch platforms

3. Poaching Mode: Directly recruit the other platform's users

4. Enhancement Mode: Create tools that make another platform better, then redirect the flow

When successful, a vampire attack can compress years of slow, painful growth into months of explosive scaling by jumpstarting network effects with pre-existing users. Let's examine some of the most effective vampire attacks in marketplace history, what made them successful, and what we can learn from them.

Note: I have done my best to write these examples based on the available facts and source materials. Any errors of storytelling are my own, but let’s also not let the facts get in the way of a good story with a lesson. 😊

Craigslist: The Ultimate Victim

If the internet had a blood bank, it would be Craigslist. The minimalist classified site has inadvertently "donated" its user base to launch numerous billion-dollar marketplaces. Its simple design, massive user base, and limited innovation made it the perfect target.

Airbnb's Classic Attack

Vampire Attack Type: Enhancement + Poaching Mode

When Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk were trying to scale Airbnb in 2009-2010, they faced the classic marketplace dilemma: travelers wouldn't use a site with few listings, and hosts wouldn't list on a site where travelers weren't looking.

But they noticed something: people were already listing their spaces on Craigslist's sublets section, which had massive traffic but a terrible user experience.

Their solution? A now-legendary growth hack that essentially siphoned both supply and demand from Craigslist:

1. They built an integration that allows Airbnb hosts to automatically cross-post their listings to Craigslist, including a link back to Airbnb.

2. They deployed supply-side outreach, directly emailing people who posted housing on Craigslist, inviting them to list on Airbnb instead.

The results were spectacular. Hosts loved the additional exposure from Craigslist's massive audience, while travelers who found these listings on Craigslist were drawn to Airbnb's superior experience (better photos, secure payments, reviews).

The hack was technically against Craigslist's terms of service, but it achieved exactly what Airbnb needed: it bootstrapped a two-sided marketplace by leveraging someone else's liquidity. By the time Craigslist shut down the integration, Airbnb had already extracted significant value.

Thumbtack's Service Provider Play

Vampire Attack Type: Enhancement Mode

Thumbtack, now worth billions, faced a similar challenge: how to build a marketplace for local service professionals across multiple categories and locations.

One of their approaches? Create a tool that enables service providers (such as plumbers, HVAC repair technicians, and handymen) to create a listing on Thumbtack easily and then automatically post it to Craigslist with a single click.

“What we built was a very easy tool for them to create a Thumbtack profile, and then with one click republish that onto Craigslist, importing all the pictures and reviews and metadata with a great sort of HTML layout, which they weren’t either interested or capable of doing themselves and was instantly valuable to them.” - Marco Zappacosta, CEO/Founder of Thumbtack

The Craigslist integration provided service providers with immediate value (easier Craigslist posting) while simultaneously expanding Thumbtack's service catalog. As providers began receiving leads through Thumbtack, they became less reliant on Craigslist and more invested in the new platform.

ApartmentList's Rental Play

Vampire Attack Type: Enhancement Mode + Poaching Mode

ApartmentList executed a similar strategy in the apartment rental space, creating tools for property managers and landlords to easily cross-post their listings from ApartmentList to Craigslist. Instant success like Airbnb and Thumbtack, right?

Not quite…

"We only tried that for a week or two and it wasn't scalable enough to drive meaningful lead volume. We did scrape Craigslist and displayed their listings with a fancier UI. So we stole users in Craigslist-dominant markets like SF, LA, NY, and Chicago by using their listings to help with our SEO." - Chris Herndon, Co-founder of ApartmentList

The strategy was simple: take Craigslist's rental inventory, present it with a superior user experience, then use SEO to intercept users searching for apartments in major metropolitan markets. Unfortunately, the golden age of SEO has come to an end, and strategies like this are becoming increasingly ineffective.

Other notable platforms that have successfully unbundled Craigslist include TaskRabbit (gig labor), StubHub (event tickets), and dozens of other vertical plays. Poor Craigslist became the unwitting victim of so many successful marketplace attacks that "unbundling Craigslist" has become a recognized playbook in Silicon Valley.

Outdoorsy’s Classifieds Strategy

Vampire Attack Type: Enhancement Mode

At Outdoorsy, I experienced firsthand how pattern recognition of these previous vampire attacks informed the growth strategy. When scaling Outdoorsy (a marketplace for RV rentals), we faced the same cold-start problem.

Initially, the company attempted the Craigslist outreach approach, but it didn't yield the desired results to scale. The company pivoted to building SaaS software for RV owners and formed partnerships with campground networks, such as KOA, to build supply.

One breakthrough came when Facebook Marketplace launched. Having studied the Craigslist vampire attacks, I immediately recognized the opportunity pattern:

1. We began manually posting RVs for rent in the "for sale" category (since there was no rental category yet).

2. The game-changer: We discovered that we could leverage dealership inventory management software with bulk listing capabilities on Facebook. We signed up with one of these platforms and posted thousands of RV listings.

The strategy worked beautifully until Facebook caught on to what was happening. But by then, we'd already captured enough supply and demand to generate momentum.

Other Vampire Success Stories

The Willing Host: Google

Vampire Attack Type: Symbiotic Mode

Before diving into specific marketplace attacks, it's worth acknowledging that nearly every successful digital platform has executed some form of vampire attack on Google. The search giant's massive reach and SEO-driven traffic have made it the ultimate target for user acquisition.

Companies like Pinterest, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and countless marketplace startups have built entire growth strategies around creating content that ranks in Google search results, then redirecting that traffic to their platforms. Pinterest mastered this by creating boards that rank for visual search terms, Yelp dominates local business searches, and travel marketplaces like Booking.com spend billions on Google Ads to intercept users searching for hotels.

The beauty of this approach is that Google facilitates these vampire attacks through its business model, as it profits from companies buying ads to steal their organic traffic, and it benefits from high-quality content that keeps users within the Google ecosystem. It's a rare case where the host platform actively enables the vampires because it serves their interests as well.

Platform Risk Alert: Google's shift toward AI-powered search is creating new vulnerabilities for companies that have built their growth strategies around traditional SEO. As Google increasingly answers questions directly through AI overviews rather than directing users to external sites, the organic traffic that many platforms have depended on for user acquisition is beginning to dry up. Companies that spent years vampiring Google's search traffic may now find themselves cut off from their primary growth channel.

The Shark and the Remora: eBay and PayPal

Vampire Attack Type: Symbiotic Mode

Before eBay acquired PayPal, the payment service executed a brilliant vampire attack on eBay's marketplace.

Unlike most examples, PayPal didn't "attack" eBay by competing directly; instead, it created a symbiotic relationship within eBay's ecosystem. Sellers independently began listing PayPal as a preferred method due to its speed and reliability. PayPal capitalized on this by offering cash referral bonuses, creating seller tools, and becoming ubiquitous in eBay listings, despite eBay promoting its payment tool, Billpoint. By the time of its acquisition for $1.5 billion in 2002, PayPal had become the default payment method on eBay, with the majority of auctions accepting it as the preferred payment method.

The key insight: sometimes you can approach a platform in a friendly manner by enhancing it rather than completely replacing it, creating value for both ecosystems while still diverting transaction flow to your platform.

Uber vs. Lyft

Vampire Attack Type: Poaching and Incentive Mode

The ridesharing wars provide a more direct and controversial example. In 2014, Uber launched "Operation SLOG" (Supplying Long-term Operations Growth) to poach drivers from Lyft.

Uber hired contractors who would:

1. Create rider accounts on Lyft.

2. Order rides, then spend the trip pitching Lyft drivers on switching to Uber.

3. Give the driver a low rating to avoid being matched again (allowing them to target more drivers).

The campaign was remarkably systematic. Uber built dedicated teams in major cities with specific targets for driver recruitment. They offered substantial bonuses (often $500 or more) for drivers who switched, and created detailed playbooks outlining how their contractors should approach Lyft drivers. Lyft estimated that, between late 2013 and 2014, Uber's team made over 5,560 fake ride requests and successfully converted thousands of Lyft drivers to either switch entirely or drive for both platforms.

"At the time, Uber had so much money at their disposal, they could focus on aggressive incentive mode tactics. The new driver sign-up bonuses were so compelling—I don't think it took much to convince a Lyft driver to sign up for Uber since they were getting a $500 bonus. As we always coach drivers, it's in their best interest to have both Uber and Lyft since you get more ride requests and a backup option." - Harry Campbell, The Rideshare Guy

The tactics were aggressive, but they worked: Uber secured more drivers in key markets at a crucial time, reinforcing its supply advantage and helping it dominate the U.S. market. By weakening Lyft's driver supply, Uber was able to offer faster pickups and better coverage, which attracted more riders, creating a virtuous cycle that cemented its lead.

The Vampire Becomes the Victim: Didi vs. Uber in China

Vampire Attack Type: Incentive Mode + Symbiotic Mode

Ironically, Uber would soon experience its “vampire attack” playbook turned against it in China by Didi Chuxing. Didi's strategy was Uber's playbook on steroids, and Didi employed massive financial incentives to lure Uber drivers onto its platform.

Armed with billions in funding from Alibaba, Tencent, SoftBank, and even Apple, Didi engaged in an all-out subsidy war. Both companies were burning billions annually, but Didi's deeper war chest allowed them to outlast Uber's resources and pull ahead. By mid-2016, Didi had captured 87% of China's ride-hailing market and was completing approximately 11 million rides per day. Uber, burning cash with a minority market share, ultimately surrendered in August 2016; they sold their China operations to Didi in exchange for an equity stake.

However, what might be more interesting is how Didi employed a symbiotic mode of attack to grow while excluding Uber from the market. Didi leveraged its investors’ platforms by embedding their services directly into WeChat and Alipay, which are apps that hundreds of millions of Chinese users access daily. When Tencent's WeChat blocked Uber's accounts, it essentially cut off Uber's access to China's dominant messaging platform. Didi rode on domestic platforms while Uber remained isolated.

Twitter's API: The Social Springboard

Vampire Attack Type: Symbiotic Mode

In its early days, Twitter's open API created an entire ecosystem of third-party apps and services that dramatically expanded the platform's reach and utility. Companies like TweetDeck, Hootsuite, and Buffer built their initial user bases on Twitter's platform.

While not a traditional marketplace vampire attack, these companies leveraged Twitter's network to bootstrap their user bases. TweetDeck became so central to the Twitter experience that Twitter eventually acquired it for over $40 million. Hootsuite grew into a social media management platform valued at over $1 billion, mainly by starting as a better interface for Twitter.

Platform Defense Alert: Twitter (now X) eventually restricted and killed much of its open API access, devastating many third-party clients and tools that had built businesses on its platform. This serves as a stark reminder of the platform risk inherent in vampire strategies that rely on continued API access.

This example offers an essential lesson for existing marketplaces: sometimes, allowing others to "vampire" your platform through an API can strengthen your network effects. By becoming a platform that others build upon, you can expand your reach and utility far beyond what you could create on your own.

TikTok's Cross-Platform Advertising Blitz

Vampire Attack Type: Symbiotic Mode

TikTok executed one of the most obvious vampire attacks in social media history by walking right through the front door. The company aggressively advertised on its direct competitors' platforms during its expansion in the U.S. The strategy was as costly as it was effective.

“We do know that armed with cash, ByteDance undertook an advertising campaign that was reported by the Wall Street Journal to be more than $1 billion dollars in 2018. That breaks down to nearly $3 million dollars in advertising daily. This included nearly $300 million on Google advertisements for TikTok in 2018.” - Margins by Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk

The approach worked brilliantly because TikTok was buying access to the exact audience they needed, young, mobile-first users already engaged with short-form content, directly from platforms that had spent years cultivating that audience. By the time competitors realized what was happening, TikTok had already established significant market presence and user habits that would be difficult to reverse.

This strategy demonstrates how newcomers can use established platforms’ advertising systems against them, turning their monetization infrastructure into a user acquisition flywheel.

Labor Marketplaces vs. Indeed

Vampire Attack Type: Symbiotic Mode

A more benign example can be found in how gig economy platforms like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart all aggressively recruit on job sites like Indeed. Unlike most vampire attacks, this is a win-win, as Indeed's business model relies on job postings.

These labor marketplaces effectively use Indeed as a supply acquisition channel, posting thousands of "driver" or "delivery partner" opportunities that direct potential workers into their recruitment funnels. With Indeed's massive reach among job seekers, these platforms can rapidly scale their workforce in new markets.

What makes this a "positive vampire attack" is that it aligns with the host platform's goals while still allowing marketplaces to bootstrap their supply side rapidly. Indeed is paid for postings, while gig economy platforms get workers, which is a symbiotic relationship rather than a parasitic one.

💡 New labor marketplaces can leverage this strategy today!

Token Attacks

Vampire Attack Type: Incentive Mode

In September 2020, SushiSwap launched and temporarily drained liquidity from Uniswap, the dominant decentralized exchange (DEX).

The attack was brilliantly simple:

1. Copy the entire Uniswap codebase (it was open source)

2. Offer SUSHI token rewards to anyone who provides liquidity to Uniswap

3. Promise to migrate all liquidity to SushiSwap after a set period

The strategy worked almost too well. Within weeks, over $1 billion in liquidity had moved from Uniswap to SushiSwap. The crypto community referred to it as "The Great Migration," as liquidity providers (the supply side of a DEX marketplace) abandoned the incumbent in favor of the promise of token rewards.

Fast forward to 2022, and we see history repeating itself. LooksRare, an NFT marketplace, executed a textbook attack on dominant player OpenSea.

The strategy relied on token incentives:

1. They airdropped LOOKS tokens to active OpenSea users (but you had to list an NFT on LooksRare to claim them)

2. They offered ongoing trading rewards in LOOKS tokens, essentially paying people to use their platform

Within two days of its launch, LooksRare's trading volumes surpassed those of OpenSea, although much of this was due to wash trading (users trading with themselves to farm tokens).

These attacks demonstrated that even the strongest network effects can be vulnerable when faced with the right incentive structure.

The Vampire Attack Playbook: Lessons for Founders

From these examples, several patterns emerge that marketplace founders can adapt:

1. Find the Blood Source

Identify where your potential users already gather. Is there an existing platform that meets your supply or demand needs? Look for platforms with:

• Large, engaged user bases

• Poor user experience or monetization

• Limited innovation or adaptation

• Vulnerability to technical integrations

• Weak value proposition or network effect

2. Create the Value Bridge

Build mechanisms that make it easy (and rewarding) for users to switch:

• Cross-posting tools that leverage the incumbent's audience

• Direct migration pathways with minimal friction

• Financial incentives or token rewards for switching

• Features that solve pain points the incumbent ignores

3. Deliver a Superior Experience

A vampire attack gets users in the door, but you need to keep them:

• Ensure your core product is genuinely better

• Address the incumbent's biggest weaknesses

• Create unique features that others can't easily copy

• Build network effects that increase switching costs over time

4. Understand Your Network Effect is Only as Strong as Your Value Prop

A critical lesson from these examples is that platforms vulnerable to vampire attacks typically have weak value propositions or network effects that are exploitable. If your marketplace creates genuine, hard-to-replicate value, users won't easily defect to competitors. Conversely, if your value is primarily in aggregation without differentiation, you're vulnerable to the same attacks.

5. Consider Legal and Ethical Boundaries

The most effective vampire attacks often push boundaries, but consider the risks:

• Technical integrations may violate the terms of service and lead to lawsuits

• Aggressive recruitment can generate backlash

• Unsustainable incentives may attract the wrong users

• The incumbent might retaliate with legal action or platform changes

Remember: these strategies typically only work for a limited time before platforms close loopholes or take legal action. Airbnb, Thumbtack, and others all eventually had their Craigslist integrations shut down. Uber faced public backlash for its aggressive tactics. Be prepared for the window of opportunity to close.

6. Beware the Platform Risk

Vampire attacks come with substantial platform risk:

• Your growth channel can be cut off instantly if the target platform changes its policies

• Terms of service violations could result in expensive lawsuits

• Building dependence on another platform creates a single point of failure

• Long-term sustainability requires developing independent acquisition channels

The more aggressive your vampire attack, the more likely and severe the eventual response from the target platform will be. Plan accordingly.

Here are some companies that were notably “deplatformed”:

• Zynga – Built on Facebook’s viral mechanics; user growth stalled when Facebook restricted feed notifications and imposed Credits tax.

• Meerkat – Gained traction via Twitter’s social graph; died quickly after Twitter cut access and backed rival Periscope.

• BranchOut – Grew by tapping Facebook friend invites; collapsed when Facebook cracked down on spammy virality.

• Amazon Marketplace Sellers – Built businesses on Amazon; many were undercut or copied by Amazon Basics.

7. Transition to Sustainable Growth

Vampire attacks are a bootstrap strategy, not a business model:

• Plan for the attack to be blocked eventually

• Build direct acquisition channels in parallel

• Focus on retention once users are acquired

• Evolve your value proposition beyond the initial hook

For Existing Marketplaces: Defense and Opportunity

If you're running an established marketplace, vampire attacks might seem like a threat, but they can also represent an opportunity. Consider:

Opening Strategic APIs: By carefully exposing parts of your platform via APIs, you can extend your reach through third-party developers. This approach helped Twitter grow dramatically in its early days, with companies like TweetDeck and Hootsuite essentially becoming distribution channels for the platform.

Turn Vampires into Features: If you're a horizontal marketplace (covering many categories), consider enabling specialized vertical marketplaces to plug into your platform. Instead of fighting the vampires, make them features that enhance your value proposition.

Network Effect Enhancement: Well-designed integrations can strengthen your network effects by making your platform more valuable to users, thereby enhancing its overall value. PayPal enhanced eBay's utility, which is why eBay eventually acquired it.

Monitor for Warning Signs: Keep an eye on user engagement patterns. If specific segments of your marketplace are vulnerable to poaching, that's a signal to enhance your value proposition for those users before a competitor capitalizes on the gap.

The Ethical Question

Let's address the elephant in the room: Are vampire attacks ethical?

The answer isn't black and white. On one hand, these tactics can push boundaries and sometimes violate the platform's terms of service. On the other hand, they often provide genuine value to users and accelerate innovation in stagnant markets.

Consider these perspectives:

The Libertarian View: Users should be free to choose the best platform for their needs. If your product is superior, why shouldn't you be able to let users know about it?

The Incumbent View: Building user bases requires significant investment. Vampire attacks free-ride on this investment without contributing to the costs.

The Consumer View: Competition generally benefits users through better features and lower prices. Vampire attacks can break monopolies and force platforms to improve.

My take? The ethics depend largely on execution. Tactics that deliberately sabotage another platform are problematic. But strategies that make it easier for users to discover and try alternatives, while adding genuine value, are fair game in competitive markets. The most successful vampire attacks ultimately succeed because they offer something better to users, not just because they're cleverly parasitic.

Final Thoughts: The Future of Vampire Attacks

As platforms become more sophisticated, traditional vampire attacks are becoming increasingly difficult to execute. Facebook, Craigslist, and others have improved their defenses against unauthorized integrations and mass outreach.

However, the fundamental strategies continue to evolve. For marketplace founders in 2025, the key question isn't whether to consider vampire tactics, but how to adapt them to today's landscape:

1. Be more surgical: Target specific high-value segments rather than broad attacks

2. Add more value: Ensure your platform solves real problems for the users you're attracting

3. Leverage new incentive models: Consider how tokens, revenue sharing, or other models can align incentives

4. Prepare for resistance: Have multiple growth strategies ready when the incumbents inevitably respond

Being early to platform shifts remains one of the most potent growth levers available. Currently, platforms like OpenAI present massive opportunities for marketplace founders who can leverage them creatively, just as mobile and social platforms created windows of opportunity for the last generation of startups. These windows inevitably close as platforms mature, but those who move quickly can establish positions that endure long after the initial opportunity fades.

Remember: a vampire attack is just the beginning. The blood infusion gives you a fighting chance, but building a sustainable marketplace still requires creating genuine, lasting value for both sides of your platform.

Have you executed or witnessed other interesting vampire attacks in the wild? Share your stories in the comments! I'm particularly interested in hearing about lesser-known examples from niche marketplaces that might provide new insights for founders.

Thanks for reading!

Please don’t forget to share this post and subscribe/follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you want to book a call, you can find me on Intro.

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Thank you to , Chris Herndon, Joe Magyer, , , Brian Nichols, and for their feedback and editing. 🙏

About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a longtime advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he served as the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and has worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, JustAnswer, and the Federal Reserve.

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👋 Welcome to the 12th edition of the Marketplace Memo. My goal is to share curated news, content, and stories related to marketplaces, along with a splash of my own color. Please enjoy and share with others!

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Remember when building a marketplace required a whole engineering team, months of development, and a small fortune to get an MVP off the ground? First came the no-code revolution with platforms like Sharetribe, Bubble, and Webflow, making it possible for non-technical founders to spin up marketplaces in days. Now we're witnessing the AI-powered development era, where tools like Lovable, Replit, and Cursor are turning natural language into functional code faster than I can explain why GMV is sometimes a vanity metric. I've watched founders go from idea to working prototype in hours if not minutes.

The barriers to entry have never been lower, and we're seeing an explosion of niche marketplaces testing hypotheses that would have been too expensive to validate just a few years ago (as well as existing marketplaces adding features at a breakneck pace). But here's the thing that hasn't changed and never will: product-market fit still requires real people making real transactions. You can build the most beautiful marketplace interface in the world using the latest AI tools, but none of that matters if you can't get buyers and sellers to have a value exchange on your platform.

This democratization of building tools means that the real competitive moats are no longer in the technology itself. They're in understanding your market, building trust between strangers, and creating that magical moment when supply meets demand. The hard part was never the code; it was figuring out how to make strangers trust each other enough to transact. And that, my friends, is still the same complex problem it's always been, just with much better tools to help you solve it.

🔥 The Highlight

Meta's $14.3 billion acquisition of a 49% stake in Scale AI has triggered a massive market disruption, forcing major AI labs to rapidly diversify their data suppliers and creating unprecedented opportunities for AI talent marketplaces. As Google and others plan to cut ties with Scale AI and reduce their planned $200 million annual spend, competitors are experiencing explosive demand growth.

The market reshuffling is creating immediate winners across the AI talent ecosystem:

• Handshake CEO Garrett Lord reports demand for his company's services "tripled overnight" following the Meta deal

  • Handshake launched Handshake AI, leveraging its network of 500,000 PhDs to provide expert model validation services

• Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth added $50 million in potential contracts in two weeks, as "frontier labs recognize that advancing AGI requires truly neutral partners."

• Micro1 has scaled to $40 million ARR, representing 400% growth since March

The Scale AI situation highlights how vertical integration in AI can lead to unintended market fragmentation. As Appen CEO Ryan Kolln described it: "This is the equivalent of an oil pipeline exploding between Russia and Europe," with customers "really quickly evaluating: how do they get alternative supply?" This forced diversification is driving major AI labs directly to specialized talent marketplaces, such as Handshake AI, Micro1, Mercor, and Turing, as they scramble to replace Scale's services with neutral partners. For these emerging platforms, this represents a rare opportunity to inherit validated enterprise demand, transforming lengthy customer acquisition cycles into immediate revenue acceleration at unprecedented scale.

📰 News

"Amazon wants to become a global marketplace for AI" - AWS is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for the AI economy through Bedrock, offering customers a choice among 100+ models rather than betting on a single winner, while competitors align closely with specific providers. It is the fastest-growing segment for AWS, accounting for 18% of revenue. Yahoo Finance

"Peloton explores placing its equipment in gyms, launching marketplace for used gear" - Peloton is testing gym partnerships through its Precor subsidiary and launched "Repowered," a peer-to-peer marketplace for used equipment, as the fitness company seeks new revenue streams beyond direct-to-consumer sales. TechCrunch

"Breaking: DoorDash Buys Symbiosys as Ad Network Hits $1B Run Rate" - DoorDash acquired NYC-based ad tech company Symbiosys for $175 million while announcing its advertising network reached a $1 billion run rate, showcasing how delivery platforms are monetizing through high-margin ads. Modern Delivery

"Report: Temu Loses 58% of US Daily Users Due to Tariffs" - Temu lost 58% of its U.S. daily users in May after the end of the de minimis exemption, highlighting the vulnerability of cross-border marketplace models to trade policy changes. PYMNTS.com

"Why retailers like Amazon and Walmart are looking into stablecoins" - Major retailers are exploring stablecoin offerings to cut billions in interchange fees and payment processing delays, with stablecoins potentially settling in seconds versus days for traditional card transactions. For marketplace operators, this signals a potential disintermediation of conventional payment rails and the emergence of new competitive dynamics surrounding transaction costs. Stripe is also already making moves around stablecoins. Axios

"Uber Promotes Company Veteran to COO as CEO Says He's Not Going 'Anywhere'" - Uber named Andrew Macdonald as its first COO since 2019, consolidating oversight of both mobility and delivery under one executive as longtime delivery chief Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty departs after 13 years. Bloomberg

"Wholesale marketplace Faire's Lauren Cooks Levitan moves from president to board—her next step is launching a startup." - Faire's president, Lauren Cooks Levitan, is stepping down to join the board and launch her startup called Root, after helping build the wholesale marketplace from initial CFO to president over six years. Fortune and LinkedIn

"Rebecca Van Dyck joins as Chief Marketing Officer, Hiroki Asai named Chief Experience Officer" - Airbnb hired Meta and Apple veteran Rebecca Van Dyck as CMO while promoting Hiroki Asai to a new Chief Experience Officer role as the company expands beyond accommodations into services and experiences. Airbnb Newsroom

"Looking for a Campsite? Hipcamp Now Has Half a Million to Choose From." - Hipcamp doubled its campsite inventory to 565,000 locations by adding private campgrounds and RV parks, positioning itself as the comprehensive platform for outdoor accommodation discovery. Outside Online

"A New Way to Discover Poshmark Listings—Now on Facebook Marketplace" - Poshmark is testing a partnership that surfaces its secondhand fashion listings directly on Facebook Marketplace, giving sellers increased visibility with zero additional effort. Poshmark

"Pre-IPO Marketplace Hiive Eyes Funding as Competition Rises" - Vancouver-based pre-IPO trading platform Hiive is seeking up to $100 million in Series B funding as competition intensifies in the secondary market for private company shares. Bloomberg

"Cargado expands freight marketplace into Canada, launches market rates tool" - Cross-border freight marketplace Cargado expanded into Canada after success in Mexico-U.S. routes, while launching a market rates tool providing instant pricing data based on 35,000+ historical bids from 200+ brokers. FreightWaves

💰 Fundraising

Akido raises $60M in Series B led by Oak HC/FT - Akido operates an AI-powered healthcare network of 240 providers across 26 specialties, using its ScopeAI system to increase clinical capacity and improve patient access to care. Business Wire

Piston raises $7.5M Seed led by Spark Capital - Piston operates a cardless payments platform connecting commercial fleets and gas stations through QR code transactions, serving over 120 fleets across 800 stations with $20M+ in annualized volume. FinSMEs and LinkedIn

📖 Reads

"What 'Working' Means in the Era of AI Apps" - a16z's revenue benchmarks for AI companies reveal median enterprise startups now hit $2M ARR in year one (vs. the old $1M benchmark), while consumer AI companies reach $4.2M ARR. Marketplace builders should note the shifted metrics and accelerated growth timelines, particularly as AI-powered features become a standard for platform businesses. Andreessen Horowitz and Twitter

"Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith on AI automation and the future of work" - The head of the Ikea-owned gig work platform discusses how AI can enhance rather than replace human labor, while navigating economic uncertainty and the rise of agentic AI systems that could book services directly. Smart insights on the resilience of platforms requiring immediate, hyperlocal supply versus those focused purely on aggregation. The Verge

Marketplace Financial Benchmarks Analysis - Comparative data across major platforms shows Amazon North America Retail dominating GMV ($600B) and EBITDA ($45.5B), while Uber Mobility and DoorDash lead growth rates (18.8% and 18.7%). Notably, Booking maintains strong profitability margins (5.5% EBITDA/GBs) despite lower growth, while Uber Delivery and DoorDash’s compressed margins (2.8%) reflect food delivery's challenging unit economics. Twitter

OnlyFans Revenue Distribution: The Pareto Principle on Steroids - Data reveals the brutal economics of creator marketplaces: over 70% of total payouts go to just 10% of creators, with average monthly revenue under $150 for most participants. This concentration (beyond the typical 80/20 rule) illustrates how network effects and algorithmic discovery create winner-take-all dynamics in creator economy platforms. LinkedIn

"How Upwork Optimizes LTV to CAC" - A primer on marketplace economics showing how Upwork predicts customer lifetime value within 24 hours of acquisition and dynamically adjusts CAC targets based on economic conditions. For marketplace operators, this is an excellent read on optimizing unit economics. Mostly Metrics

Mostly metrics

How Upwork Optimizes LTV to CAC

Inspired by the love we got on our case studies of How Uber manages take rate and How PayPal forecasts revenue, we’re here to crack the code on How Upwork optimizes LTV to CAC…

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a year ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · CJ Gustafson

"The DoorDash Operating System, part 0." - Steve Kenning adds to his series on DoorDash's operating system by exploring how the company weaponized discomfort to drive execution in a brutal marketplace business. His thesis, that comfortable teams build mediocre products, resonates deeply, especially his point about how bureaucracy, groupthink, and empire-building hinder marketplace velocity. Missing & Incorrect

Missing & Incorrect

The DoorDash Operating System, part 1.

This whole blog is nothing if not one giant, mostly-accurate subtweet of all the various models, processes, and principles that comprised what you could call the DoorDash Operating System. And arguably no part of that system was more important - and deserving of being part 1 - than how it set and then methodically worked to hit its incredibly ambitious …

Read more

2 years ago · 7 likes · Steve Kenning

"Fighting Disintermediation: Can AI Today and Agentic Commerce Tomorrow Help Marketplaces Survive?" - Matt Bendett, the co-founder of Peerspace, explores how AI tools can help platforms combat circumvention today while preparing for the agentic commerce future where intelligent agents may bypass traditional marketplaces entirely. No Fixed Path

No Fixed Path

Fighting Disintermediation: Can AI Finally Turn the Tide?

Before we get started, a quick note. I owe a small apology for the long silence between posts. When I launched this newsletter, I’d hoped to publish something every couple of weeks, but life had other plans. Between family, advising early-stage startups, and thinking through my own next chapter, I’ve been busier than expected…

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a year ago · 4 likes · Matt Bendett

"Price and prejudice: Gender discrimination in online marketplaces" - Academic research examining gender discrimination in Facebook Marketplaces through experimental buyer profiles, revealing how bias persists even in digital commerce environments. Essential findings for marketplace operators focused on trust and safety. ScienceDirect

"Trivago watched its revenue forecast plummet from $1 billion to nearly zero—so the company tapped a set of former interns to turn it around" - Trivago's CEO, CFO, and CMO were all once interns at the company and are now leading its recovery efforts after the metasearch platform faced near-extinction during the pandemic. Fortune

"DOGE Days" - Sahil Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad, shares a candid account of his 55-day stint as a software engineer with the Department of Government Efficiency. Sahil Lavingia

Watch or Listen

"Mercor CEO: Evals Will Replace Knowledge Work, AI x Hiring Today & the Future of Data Labeling" - Brendan Foody explains how Mercor is revolutionizing hiring by creating infrastructure that helps AI labs label data, evaluate candidates, and make performance-driven decisions. With $100M in fresh funding and partnerships with top AI players, they're shifting recruiting from intuition to measurable prediction—a glimpse into the future of talent marketplaces. YouTube

"Why Uber's CPO delivers food on weekends" - Behind Uber's extreme dogfooding and "ship, ship, ship" culture with CPO Sachin Kansal, who personally completes nearly 1,000 Uber driving and delivery trips to sharpen product insight and user empathy. A masterclass in building product culture through firsthand experience and rapid iteration. Lenny's Newsletter

"Episode 49: Dan Park and the Incredible Comeback Story of Clutch" - Fabrice Grinda of FJ Labs interviews Dan Park, CEO of Clutch (the "Carvana of Canada"), about surviving a near-death experience in 2023 and engineering a remarkable turnaround. The transparency around their journey from burning $5M per month to profitability offers invaluable lessons for any marketplace founder navigating challenging times. Fabrice Grinda

"Tech Scenes with Brian McMahon" - Jeff James Martin talks with Pickle's CEO about pivoting from a social polling app to building a peer-to-peer rental marketplace. Brian's emphasis on getting in front of customers and building tight feedback loops is an excellent lesson in marketplace fundamentals. Spotify

“Michael Farb, CEO of Boatsetter, on leading the go to platform for boating experiences worldwide!” - Michael shares how Boatsetter has become the go-to platform for boat rentals, offering everything from self-captained adventures to fully crewed experiences. The discussion covers the marketplace's foundations, impressive customer retention through stellar reviews, and insights into operating a two-sided market in the marine space.

Marketplace Jobs

• Founding Engineer (String AI)

• Staff, Product Manager, Ad Experiences (Walmart)

• Product Design Director (Faire)

• Principal, Product Manager - Marketplace (Walmart)

• Director of Business Development & Partnerships (Piston Pay)

• Product Manager, Consumer Commerce (Slice)

• Various Roles (Belong)

• Various Roles (Mercor)

Would you like to see your job listed here? Email colin@yonder.vc with the subject line “Job Posting” to be included or get your job featured!

Thanks for reading!

That is a wrap for the week! As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any missed feedback or news. Hot tips are always welcome. Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you want to book a call, you can find me on Intro.

Share

About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a longtime advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he served as the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and has worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, JustAnswer, and the Federal Reserve. 

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👋 Welcome to the 11th edition of the Marketplace Memo. My goal is to share curated news, content, and stories related to marketplaces, along with a splash of my own color. Please enjoy and share with others!

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AI Will Steal My Job Vibe:

The marketplace world is going AI-first, and if you're burying your head in the sand, you're not doing yourself any favors. This isn't just about adding a chatbot to your customer service to reduce headcount. We are talking about fundamental changes to how marketplaces operate, compete, and create value.

The transformation is playing out in real-time across major platforms. Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman just sent a brutal memo to employees: "AI is coming for your jobs. It's coming for my job too." His advice? Master AI tools or get replaced by someone who will. "Those who will not wake up and understand the new reality fast are, unfortunately, doomed." Pretty stark words from someone running a platform built on human freelancers, though Kaufman insists these tools are meant to empower creators, not replace them.

Meanwhile, Duolingo went full "AI-first," announcing they'll "gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle." The results speak for themselves, as they doubled their course offerings to 148 new AI-created courses in under a year, a task that used to take a decade. The backlash was swift, forcing CEO Luis von Ahn to walk back some comments and clarify they're still hiring, but the underlying message was crystal clear: AI is reshaping how content gets created at scale.

The reality is that this isn't about whether AI will reshape marketplaces, it's about whether you'll lead that transformation or watch competitors do it first. The companies pretending this isn't happening are actively choosing to become irrelevant in a world where AI-native marketplaces will eat their lunch.

The Highlight

Airbnb is launching services across 10 categories in 260 cities globally, marking one of the most significant marketplace expansions since the platform's founding. The company plans to invest $200 million to $250 million in this new business.

In Marketplace Memo #6, I speculated that Airbnb might expand into traditional travel categories, such as flights and rental cars, to become a full-on OTA. Instead, they went the services route, which is arguably much harder. Dan Hockenmaier, CSO at Faire, thinks this will be difficult because "The primary way you build a giant consumer app is by building a habit. Building a habit is very hard unless your customers have a frequent use case."

It will be interesting to see how this one plays out, as service demand is inherently infrequent, and high-quality supply is typically already in high demand. I also think that the problem is less acute than the original one Airbnb solved. However, I also believe Airbnb might have the scale to make this work, and I know they have some great people working on it. Time will tell.

News

"Instacart gives rosy outlook after best order growth since 2022" - Instacart reported 14% order growth to 83.2M in Q1 2025, its strongest performance in ten quarters, while revenue grew 8% despite a 4% decline in average order value. The delivery company is focused on customer engagement by lowering the minimum delivery amount for free delivery from $35 to $10, as well as offering restaurant delivery via an Uber Eats partnership. Bloomberg

"Leadership Update: A Letter from Fidji Simo" - Instacart CEO Fidji Simo announced she will leave the grocery delivery marketplace in the coming months to become CEO of OpenAI Applications, with Chief Business Officer Chris Rogers named as her successor effective August 15. Rogers brings 20+ years of experience, including 11 years at Apple as Managing Director for Canada and deep grocery retail relationships from his P&G background, representing continuity in marketplace operations while highlighting how AI leadership roles are attracting top platform executives. LinkedIn

"DoorDash buys SevenRooms for $1.2 billion in restaurant tech bet" - DoorDash acquired hospitality tech company SevenRooms for $1.2B to add reservation and customer management tools to its merchant platform, extending beyond delivery into full-service restaurant operations. This signals the delivery giant's evolution into a comprehensive restaurant commerce platform, competing directly with traditional POS and CRM providers. Bloomberg

"Uber to launch restaurant reservations with OpenTable" - Uber Eats will introduce a "Dine Out" feature in September, enabling customers to book restaurant reservations through OpenTable integration, with Uber One members receiving priority access to popular venues. The partnership creates a direct competitive response to DoorDash's acquisition of SevenRooms. Bloomberg

"DoorDash widened its gap vs Uber Eats last quarter" - DoorDash continues to outpace Uber Eats in quarterly growth metrics, maintaining its position as the dominant US food delivery marketplace. The performance gap suggests that network effects and merchant relationships are becoming increasingly defensible moats in the delivery sector. Restaurant Business Online

"Big week for drone delivery at DoorDash" - DoorDash continues expanding its autonomous delivery initiatives with new drone partnerships and pilot programs. The push into autonomous fulfillment represents a critical infrastructure investment as delivery platforms can reduce per-order economics and delivery speed. LinkedIn

"Turo is now available on Uber Rent" - Turo's peer-to-peer car sharing marketplace is now integrated with Uber Rent in the US, allowing Uber customers to discover and book from over 1,600 vehicle makes and models directly through the Uber app. Turo

"Amazon's Grubhub deal is delivering big results" - Prime members have saved over $1 billion in waived subscription fees through the ongoing Grubhub+ partnership, with 60% of orders coming from suburban markets outside major cities. Amazon's bundling strategy is proving effective at driving engagement beyond urban cores while strengthening the Prime value proposition. Fast Company

"Vinted delivers strong, profitable growth while investing in Vinted Go and Vinted Pay" - Vinted posted 36% revenue growth to €813.4M in 2024 with net profit jumping 330% to €76.7M, while expanding into new categories like electronics and launching investment arm Vinted Ventures. The secondhand marketplace is proving that category expansion and vertical integration are the hallmarks of great marketplaces. Vinted

"Tinder CEO Faye Iosotaluno to step down in July" - Tinder CEO Faye Iosotaluno will step down in July after less than two years leading the dating app, with Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff stepping in to lead the team. Her departure comes as the dating app faces challenges attracting users, with Match Group reporting a 5% fall in paying users and announcing a 13% workforce reduction. Apparently, “No Tinder CEO has been in the role for more than two years after co-founder Sean Rad left in 2016.” LinkedIn

"HomeGrind App launched for home baristas" - New marketplace app HomeGrind allows home baristas to set up coffee services and already has 650 baristas signed up! I love that this was vibe-coded and the idea behind it. LinkedIn

Fundraising

CNaught raises $4.5M Seed led by Bow Capital - CNaught operates a marketplace that simplifies carbon credit purchasing for businesses by curating science-backed portfolios and offering a first-of-its-kind guarantee to replace credits if they're canceled or suspended. Participants include FJ Labs, Silence VC, Karman Ventures, and Marketplace Capital. TechCrunch

Doji raises $14M Seed led by Thrive Capital - Doji operates an AI-powered marketplace that creates personalized avatars for virtual try-ons, making apparel shopping both fun and social by serving users different looks that may inspire clothing purchases. Seven Seven Six participated in the round. TechCrunch

Fleequid raises €3M Seed led by DFF Ventures - Fleequid built the first online marketplace for buying and selling used buses in Europe, addressing a fragmented €14B industry where over 100,000 buses change hands annually. Participants include Silence VC, FJ Labs, and angel investor Jack Greco (Co-founder of ACV Auctions). EU-Startups

Palmstreet raises $25M (Seed and Series A) from a16z, Craft Ventures, and Headline - Palmstreet operates a live shopping marketplace that connects creators and collectors across categories like handmade crafts, crystals, and plants, with community sales growing 5X over the past 12 months. Palmstreet Blog

Wander raises $50M Series B led by QED Investors and Fifth Wall - Wander operates a marketplace of over 1,000 premium vacation homes that consistently delivers exceptional hospitality experiences. Or as Arfur Rock puts it: “Airbnb but for founders who sold secondaries.” Participants include Redpoint, Uncork, Starwood, Authentic, Breyer, Alumni, Hakluyt, Activant, and Soma. Wander Blog

Reads

"Reimagining How People Buy, Sell and Exchange Goods, Services and Experiences with AI" - Headline's investment thesis focuses on companies that fundamentally rethink commerce transactions, not just digitize workflows, with AI now making "tractable what used to feel impossible" in traditionally slow-moving industries. The firm sees opportunities in under-digitized sectors, such as supply chain, manufacturing, and government, where AI can automate manual processes and increase visibility. Beyond transforming old industries, AI is spawning entirely new categories from data center cooling to "agent-to-agent transactions" that could reshape how future commerce operates. Headline

"Our Source of Truth on B2B Secondhand Industrials Marketplaces" - FJ Labs investor Lauren Lee breaks down why secondhand industrial marketplaces are finally ready for digitization, highlighting that success hinges on buyer-seller price alignment and participant symmetry rather than just supply acquisition. The analysis reveals that platforms work best when suppliers view assets as already depreciated (seeking write-offs) rather than financial instruments (seeking value optimization), and when mid-market participants serve as both buyers and sellers to drive network effects. As traditional supply chains face tariff pressures and geopolitical volatility, secondhand offers a more resilient alternative but only if marketplaces can address trust issues through inspections, financing, and domain-specific workflows. Essential reading for understanding why some industrial marketplaces thrive while others struggle with liquidity. LinkedIn

"Trends – Artificial Intelligence" - Mary Meeker of Bond Capital's comprehensive 339-page AI trends report shows that "AI user and usage trending is ramping materially faster" than previous technology cycles, with ChatGPT reaching 800MM users in just 17 months while achieving 365B annual searches 5.5x faster than Google. The report shows that while AI model training costs are rising to billions of dollars, inference costs have fallen by 99.7% over the past two years, creating a paradox where "training is expensive, serving is getting cheap, and pricing power is slipping" for model providers. Great reading for understanding how AI is fundamentally reshaping business models, with the stark warning that "you're not going to lose your job to an AI, but you're going to lose your job to somebody who uses AI." Bond Capital

"Riders say they're hitting the brakes—and the growing price gap may be why" - Gridwise Analytics reveals a striking divergence in rideshare pricing strategy: Uber's average trip price rose from $19.95 to $22.83 since January 2024, while Lyft's dropped to $18.92, creating a $4 price gap that's reshaping rider behavior. Over half of riders surveyed have already reduced usage due to pricing, with 70%+ suggesting they will cut back further if costs continue climbing. This data shows how pricing strategy directly impacts marketplace liquidity a critical lesson for any platform balancing unit economics with user retention. If you have a truly better product and a network effect, you can also have pricing power. LinkedIn

"Marketplace Moats in the Age of AI" - Network effects remain important but AI is reshaping marketplace defensibility, with data network effects becoming "more important than ever" since proprietary transaction data outperforms general AI models. The analysis identifies seven AI-era moats, including workflow lock-in, atomic network density, and embedded fintech, with marketplaces focused on physical assets having advantages over purely digital ones. The SNAK team concludes that "the most promising marketplace startups won't just connect supply and demand—they'll layer intelligence, infrastructure, and trust in ways that make switching feel impossible". Snak VC

Watch or Listen

"How Booking.com tackled a data quality crisis" - Nimit Bhardwaj from Booking.com walks through his team's two-track approach to solving a high-stakes data quality issue that threatened financial systems, ultimately achieving a 12x improvement through automation and clear ownership. Great viewing for any marketplace dealing with legacy data systems and the inevitable migration chaos that follows. Mind the Product

“Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on AI: The future is going to be more complex, not simpler” - CNBC

Scaling Clutch As A Leading Marketplace For Buying & Selling Cars With Dan Park - Everything Marketplaces

Secrets of Successful Marketplaces with Sharetribe’s CMO - The CEO and the Salesman Podcast

Marketplace Jobs

• Global Influencer Lead (Airbnb)

• Product Manager (FreshX)

• Head of Growth (Rare Candy)

• Founding Sales Representative (Recess)

• Alloy Advisor - Client Success Agent (Alloy)

• General Manager, Enterprise Operations – FlyAway (CharterUP)

• Senior Manager of Marketplace Business Operations & Analytics (Peerspace)

• Director of Customer Experience (AppSumo)

• Associate Lifecycle Marketing Manager (Poshmark)

• Multiple Roles (Pickle)

• Multiple Positions (Peerspace)

Want to see your job listed here? Email colin@yonder.vc with the subject line “Job Posting” to be included or get your job featured!

Thanks for reading!

That is a wrap for the week! As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any missed feedback or news. Hot tips are always welcome. Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you want to book a call, you can find me on Intro.

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About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a long-time advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he was the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, Justanswer, and the Federal Reserve. 

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👋 Welcome to the 10th edition of the Marketplace Memo. I can’t believe I made it this far! My goal is to share curated news, content, and stories related to marketplaces, along with a splash of my own color. Please enjoy and share with others!

This post was spoken into existence with…

Wispr Flow - Think it,‍ Speak it, Send it.

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The Vibe: Google's Ad Marketplace Defies AI Disruption Fears

Google's advertising marketplace, the company's dominant revenue engine, has defied predictions that AI would undermine its effectiveness. Ad revenue grew to over $ 50.7 billion in the latest quarter, a 10% year-over-year increase that exceeded market expectations. On the earnings call, it was stated that “with the launch of AI Overviews, the volume of commercial queries has increased," suggesting that AI features are driving valuable search activity rather than diminishing it. This performance directly contradicts the widespread belief that other LLMs and generative AI features would reduce ad clicks by answering queries directly. Instead, it demonstrates that AI overlays have enhanced Google's core marketplace at least for now.

The key finding here for marketplaces is that properly implemented AI strengthens, rather than weakens, platform economics and usage. For Google, AI has become an enhancement layer that improves relevance and usage rather than an existential threat. The lesson for other marketplace operators is clear: AI, when thoughtfully integrated, can amplify a marketplace's fundamental value proposition of facilitating matches between supply and demand. The winners in this new paradigm won't be those who view AI as a replacement for their core functionality, but those who leverage it to make their marketplaces more precise, relevant, and valuable to all participants. Make your product so good with AI that users want to come back again and again!

The Highlight

According to Capital One (which uses a coupon extension to source this data, I believe), Facebook Marketplace has 1.228 billion monthly users, which is massive. This scale also makes it one of the largest commerce platforms out there. Some other interesting statistics from Capital One:

• Up to 40% of Facebook’s 3.07 billion monthly active users shop on Marketplace,

• An estimated 491 million or 16% of active users log in to Facebook for the sole purpose of shopping on Facebook Marketplace.

• 250 million sellers worldwide use Facebook Marketplace.

• In 2022, Facebook Marketplace users increased 3.61% year-over-year (YoY).

News

"Lyft to enter European market with $200 million FreeNow acquisition" - Lyft is expanding into Europe through the acquisition of FreeNow from BMW and Mercedes-Benz. The company needs to continue growing, and expanding into new markets is one way to do it. Yahoo Finance

"DoorDash offers to buy Deliveroo for $2.40 a share" - More growth via international expansion for a company that has been hyper-focused on the US. Bloomberg

"Temu quietly makes drastic decision as consumers switch gears" - On April 9th, the shopping giant turned off all Google Shopping ads in response to rising tariffs. The company accounted for 20% of all Google Shopping ad impressions before the shut-off. The Street

"Turo cuts 15% of workers after icing IPO" - The car rental marketplace has reduced its workforce following its decision to postpone its IPO. It is a bummer to see this. Bloomberg

"Home services company Thumbtack is thriving even as the real estate market stays slow" - Thumbtack reported revenue of $400 million in 2024, up 27% YoY. The company is putting a heavy focus on AI. Maybe an IPO in the making? Fast Company

"Piper Sandler Proposes eBay and Etsy Tie-Up to Compete With Amazon" - The investment firm suggests a merger between two major marketplaces to challenge Amazon's dominance. I think that on paper, adding together the user bases makes it look big, but it ultimately misunderstands the network effects and different buyer bases. Neither is growing particularly fast, compared to Amazon. Yahoo Finance

"Etsy to sell music gear marketplace Reverb" - The creative goods marketplace is divesting its music equipment platform to focus more on the core marketplace and Depop. Retail Dive

"Russian state takes over yet another e-commerce leader, online marketplace Avito" - Russia assumes control of the digital commerce platforms, which apparently has been a larger trend, but is the first I heard of it. It looks like they are consolidating around VK (the Russian equivalent of Facebook) and Yandex (the Russian equivalent of Google). MSN

"Black-market groups on Facebook are reportedly selling Uber and DoorDash accounts" - Underground markets are emerging for rideshare and delivery accounts that bypass verification requirements. Fortune

"Zillow turns full-blown housing market bear—just look at its new forecast" - Zillow is projecting, based on its marketplace data, that US home prices, as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index, will fall 1.7% between March 2025 and March 2026. Fast Company

"NFT Marketplace Magic Eden Acquires Trading App Slingshot" - The Solana-based NFT marketplace is expanding its capabilities through this acquisition, which will allow it to sell across multiple blockchains. CoinDesk

RUCK Construction Material Delivery Marketplace Launches Material Price Tracking - In response to rising prices from tariffs, RUCK has launched a construction material price tracking app for contractors. LinkedIn

“Peer-to-Peer Rental Startup Pickle Expands Into Miami” - The peer-to-peer clothes sharing app launches in Miami, stemming from organic growth and demand. Here is the Co-Founder’s post as well. Sourcing Journal

Fundraising

Fora Raises $35M in Series B Funding Led by Thrive Capital and Insight Partners - Fora continues to expand its platform for travel agents. The company announced a $13.5M Series A from Forerunner in August 2022. Fora Travel

Crux Raises $50M Series B Funding Round Led by Lower Carbon Capital - Climate tech marketplace Crux raises substantial capital to expand its climate intelligence solutions and debt marketplace. The company has raised $77M thus far. Crux Climate

Reads

"AI Agents As Customers: Rethinking The Marketplace Of The Future" - Thought piece on how AI agents will transform marketplace dynamics and consumer behavior. Forbes

"How to Structure a B2B Marketplace Venture" - Research study of 200 B2B marketplaces about the challenges of building them. 51% of respondents were pure startups, 30% were corporate marketplaces, and 19% were corporate spin-offs. MIT Sloan Management Review

"Facebook Is Just Craigslist Now" - Analysis of how Facebook Marketplace has evolved to resemble the classified ad platform in both function and culture. The Atlantic

"Why Is Facebook Marketplace Hard to Use" - An exploration of user experience challenges on the social media giant's marketplace but also noting that it is the key reason so many users have the app in the first place. As noted above, Facebook Marketplace is massive! Dwell

"How Airbnb Measures Listing Lifetime Value" - Inside look at the vacation rental marketplace's approach to valuing and optimizing property listings’ LTV. It is a very interesting approach focused on marginal and incremental gains, which I think is the right way to think about this at their scale. Medium - Airbnb Engineering

"Slow, Slow, Slow, Slow...Then Overnight" - Reflection on the non-linear growth pattern of LLM referral traffic to Zumper by the Founder and how it is similar to the early days of Google. LinkedIn - Anthemos Georgiades

Flexport’s Private Market Stock Price - Interesting data around the market’s reaction to Flexport reporting lower growth and delayed profitability. LinkedIn - Sim Desai

Watch or Listen

District x Marketplaces - 6-week founder program for consumer marketplace companies. I will be a guest speaker. Please see more below! LinkedIn

Starting & Scaling Treet with Jake Disareli, CEO of Treet - A great interview with Mike Williams of Everything Marketplaces.

Marketplace Jobs

• Vice President of Product - Venteur

• Senior Product Designer, Consumer Retention - DoorDash

• Manager, Marketplace Strategic Initiatives - Walmart

• Senior Manager, Marketplace - Staples

• Product Manager - Vivid Seats

• Vice President, Product, Storefront and Buyer Experience - Xometry

• Senior Director, Creative - The Knot Worldwide

• Marketplace Billing Lead - MongoDB

• Growth Marketing Manager, GTM - CookUnity

• Senior Marketing Manager, SEO & CRO - Thumbtack

• Support Role - Gumroad

Want to see your job listed here? Email colin@yonder.vc with the subject line “Job Posting” to be included or get your job featured!

Thanks for reading!

That is a wrap for the week! As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any missed feedback or news. Hot tips are always welcome. Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you want to book a call, you can find me on Intro.

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This week, I want you to learn!

6-week Founder Program for Consumer Marketplace Companies

The founder community, District, is launching its next 6-week virtual program, designed explicitly for marketplace founders scaling post-seed companies. The program is led by Erin Anderson, a marketplace vet from Lyft, Airbnb, and Postmates, and will launch on May 15, 2025.

This program is designed not only to provide practical insights but also to create lasting connections within a community that includes trailblazing marketplace leaders. It’s more than just a series of speakers—it’s a place for growth, collaboration, and learning from other founders.

District x Marketplace Program Details:

• Exclusivity: 10-person cohort

• Start Date: May 15, 2025

• Schedule: Thursdays, 3-4:30 PDT

• Speakers: Industry leaders from top marketplace companies like Airbnb, DoorDash, Postmates, and Lyft

• Format: 6 virtual sessions and mastermind groups including onboarding, 6 expert-led workshops, and optional 1:1 office hours

• Access: 1-year District membership for continued networking and resources.

Learn More

About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a long-time advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he was the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, Justanswer, and the Federal Reserve. 

Subscribe now

👋 Welcome to the 9th edition of the Marketplace Memo. My goal is to share curated news, content, and stories I am seeing related to marketplaces with a splash of color from me. Please enjoy and share with others!

This post was spoken into existance with…

Wispr Flow - Think it,‍ Speak it, Send it.

Effortless voice dictation in every application: 3x faster than typing, AI commands and auto-edits. I literally use this product all the time. Get one month of Wispr Flow Pro free once you reach 2,000 words.

Get Me Wispr Flow

Every Great SaaS Product Eventually Becomes a Marketplace

SaaS platforms follow a semi-predictable evolution. They start by solving workflow problems and become essential systems of record. They build deep hooks into their customers' processes as they capture business data and operations. This creates a foundation of trust and dependency, but the smartest SaaS founders don't stop there. They recognize that their position as workflow hubs creates natural marketplace opportunities.

Ryan's tweet perfectly captures the natural next step for successful SaaS products. Once you've achieved workflow dominance, you can leverage that position to enable commerce between users or third parties. We've seen this pattern repeatedly: Shopify (app marketplace), HubSpot (templates/apps/solutions marketplace), Toast (ordering marketplace). These platforms transformed from workflow tools into commerce ecosystems, generating massive additional revenue through marketplace models. The marketplace evolution isn't just a feature; it's becoming the expected path for any SaaS product that achieves true scale.

P.S. Granola is an excellent tool, and I am an avid user.

The Highlight

If you are like me, you had no idea what an MCP was until recently.

MCPs (Model Context Protocols) are emerging as a critical layer in the AI ecosystem, enabling large language models to interface with external tools, data, and services in a standardized way. As Jeff Weinstein's tweet suggests, we're now entering the era of MCP marketplaces where developers can discover, implement, and monetize these integrations.

These marketplaces will simplify access to a growing and increasingly fragmented ecosystem of MCP servers, acting as a unified layer for discovery, implementation, and payment. This shift mirrors the rise of app stores during the mobile era, unlocking distribution and monetization channels for MCP providers. As AI-native applications proliferate, MCP marketplaces could become the central commerce hubs for AI toolchains. It is very exciting, and the winners are yet to be determined.

If you are building an MCP marketplace, contact me at colin@yonder.vc!

News

"Flexport Misses Profitability Target" - The freight marketplace is extending the timeline to profitability on its path to potentially going public. The company has raised $2.3B and is likely looking to get investors some money back at some point. WSJ

"Klarna and StubHub Delay IPOs Because of Trump Tariff Turmoil" - The fintech giant and ticket marketplace have postponed their public offerings due to market uncertainty following the tariff announcements. Wah Wah. TechCrunch

"AppSumo Celebrates 15 Years" - The software deals marketplace has been going strong for fifteen years. It was originally founded by Noah Kagan, who shares his learnings about building the company in the article. Spoiler alert: Building a company is challenging but rewarding. AppSumo

"Uber and OpenTable Announce Strategic Global Partnership to Enhance Dining Experience for Millions of Consumers" - The rideshare giant and restaurant reservation platform are teaming up. This is an exciting play as OpenTable has a massive restaurant network and also happens to be owned by Booking.com (Dara’s old nemesis at Expedia). Here is more context from the Head of Americas at Uber Eats on the partnership. Uber

"Grubhub Revives Seamless Delivery Brand in NYC" - The recently acquired food delivery company is bringing back the Seamless brand in New York City, where it continues to have strong brand affinity and recognition. This is one of the interesting parts about food delivery: the first mover can often gain and maintain the market share simply by being first. Bloomberg

"Tinder Introduces AI Flirting Practice Bot" - The dating app is launching an AI bot that allows users to practice flirting before engaging with real matches. The video demo from the CEO is hilarious. Fast Company

"Ulta Beauty to Expand eCommerce With 'Curated' Marketplace" - The beauty retailer lost market share for the first time in 2024 and is looking to launch the marketplace to expand their offerings. Native corporate marketplaces are the trend right now. PYMNTS

"Goodwill Closes Online Marketplace GoodwillFinds, Leaves eBay Style Auction Site Open" - Apparently, the non-profit did $53.6M in donations sales in 2023/2024. RetailWire

"Amazon wants to turn your photo library into an online marketplace" - Amazon is integrating image recognition technology into its photos service to enable seamless shopping from users' photo libraries. This is a pretty cool idea; you can see the demo here. Business Insider

"The ‘Largest Illicit Online Marketplace’ Ever Is Growing at an Alarming Rate, Report Says" - Huione Guarantee, which might be Silk Road 2.0, has likely enabled $24B in gray market transactions for scam services. WIRED

“Rarible NFT Marketplace Shifts to B2B” - Some might read this as a pivot to B2B, but I see it as a move to a marktplace+ model in the form of a SaaS-enabled marketplace. X

Fundraising

Venteur raises a $20M Series A led by Informed Ventures and American Family Ventures. Venteur is a human-first healthcare platform focused on Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements (ICHRAs). Venteur

Solace Health raises $60 Million Series B led by Menlo Ventures and SignalFire. Solace is a healthcare marketplace for patient advocates. WSJ

Cargado raises a $12M Series A led by LGVP. Cargado is a marketplace for cross-border freight. Cargado

Ponte Labor raises a $3M Seed led by Harlem Capital. Ponte Labor is a labor marketplace for Hispanic immigrants to jobs using WhatsApp as the primary interface. TechCrunch

Hubble raises $800K Pre-Seed. The company is a marketplace for people to connect with experts and creators. I joined the platform and have already received my first booking! LinkedIn

Reads

"One strategic PLG bet now drives 60% of Maven’s leads 🤯." - Gagan Biyani shares how Lightning Lessons (30 min highly practical classes) became Maven's main product-led growth motion. This makes sense as people are time-constrained and like bite-sized learning before fully committing. LinkedIn

"The Evolution of Marketplaces" - This is a very in-depth post from Eric Flaningam at Felicis Ventures on the evolution of marketplaces and the dynamics at play. Generative Value

"Online Marketplaces: Beyond the Number of Buyers and Sellers" - This research paper from the University of Maryland suggests that marketplaces adding marquee buyers can benefit significantly if they have great supply. Still, having subpar supply can be very detrimental and cause revenue loss across the board. Smith School

"The Magic of Marketplaces" - A reflection by Deb Liu on her time building marketplaces, what makes them interesting, and what that might mean for the future with AI. Perspectives

"Autonomous B2B Marketplaces" - The SNAK team shares an interesting analysis of how automation and AI are transforming B2B transactions and making them autonomous. SNAK VC

"A Guide to Disrupting Incumbents" - This is an excellent read from the Euclid Ventures team on how to go about beating incumbents. Euclid Insights

Watch or Listen

“Starting Wonderschool As A Leading Child Care Marketplace With Chris Bennett” - Mike at Everything Marketplaces does a Q&A with Chris Bennett, the CEO of Wonderschool.

Marketplace Jobs

• Digital Marketing And Community Manager - BioBuzz

• Senior Product Designer, Growth - Bounce

• Director, Financial Planning & Analysis - GOAT

• Senior Software Engineer - Cargado

• Account Executive - AppSumo

• Full Stack Software Engineer - Recess

• Partnerships and Mentor Relations Coordinator - College Contact

• Lifecycle Marketing Manager - Leland

• Growth Product Manager - Solace Health

• Growth Marketing Manager - BizScout

• Technical Program Manager - uShip

Want to see your job listed here? Email colin@yonder.vc with the subject line “Job Posting” to be included or get your job featured!

Thanks for reading!

That is a wrap for the week! As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any missed feedback or news. Hot tips are always welcome. Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you want to book a call, you can find me on Intro.

Share

This week I want you to win…

AppSumo - The Biggest Marketplace for AI Tools

AppSumo is running a ChatGPT Plus giveaway, and you can win it for life! This is for their AI week from 4/21-25. Be sure to mark your calendars and sign up to see the deals! There are some great software deals coming.

Win ChatGPT For Life

About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a long-time advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he was the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, Justanswer, and the Federal Reserve. 

Subscribe now

👋 Welcome to the 8th edition of the Marketplace Memo. My goal is to share curated news, content, and stories I am seeing related to marketplaces with a splash of color from me. Please enjoy and share with others!

StubHub's IPO: A Founder Forgotten in the Fine Print

Last week, StubHub filed its S-1, initiating its journey to the public markets a quarter-century after its founding in 2000. Like Craigslist's recent 30th anniversary, this milestone reminds us how resilient marketplace businesses can be. StubHub's path to IPO hasn’t been linear—from its Stanford Business School genesis by Jeff Fluhr and Eric Baker to its $310 million acquisition by eBay in 2007, followed by its 2020 acquisition by Viagogo for $4 billion right before the pandemic devastated live events.

The S-1 provides the first public glimpse at the ticketing behemoth’s numbers. At the end of 2024, the company had produced $8.7 billion in Gross Merchandise Sales, growing 27% YoY. This transaction volume generated $1.77B in revenue, growing 29% YoY with a ~20% take rate. A 20% take rate is the hallmark of a scaled consumer marketplace, allowing the company to produce $299M in Adjusted EBITDA (17% margin). The business seems to be strong and performing well. However, the S-1 has one glaring omission.

The S-1 states: “Our journey began in 2000 when our Founder and CEO, Eric Baker, founded StubHub,” which glazes over the other Co-founder, Jeff Fluhr. Jeff has publicly acknowledged this and provided a succinct history of the company for the record:

"I co-founded StubHub with Eric when we were first year students at Stanford Business School. I wrote the 2 page executive summary that resulted in our selection as a finalist for the Stanford business plan competition in February 2000. I dropped out to be StubHub’s CEO, built the team, built the product, signed our first major partners (Major League Baseball, the Seattle Mariners, the Arizona Diamondbacks, and MSN), raised our Series A and launched the company. Meanwhile Eric elected to finish business school and joined 18 months later in the summer of 2001 as a remote employee based in L.A. Eric focused on PR, business development and fundraising and was a valuable contributor in these areas. To put this all in perspective, as co-founders we agreed to a 75/25 equity split, with me getting the larger share."

Eric Baker later left StubHub in 2004 to start the European ticket marketplace Viagogo, creating an unusual situation in which he eventually acquired the company he co-founded. The timing of that acquisition couldn't have been worse—just before the pandemic shut down live events worldwide. Nevertheless, StubHub weathered the storm under Eric and seeks to go public for between $8B and 10B. This IPO will be the first major marketplace to go public in quite some time.

The Highlight

Mercor keeps growing fast and profitably. Again, this is the annual revenue run rate, so it is not $100M earned but the revenue if the current trajectory is maintained. As they define it, whether this is Gross Service Value or actual net revenue is still an open question. Either way, it is impressive.

Some other data points are that the average pay rate is $61.50 per hour, 71% of active contractors are in the US, and 3,216 people were hired in the last 30 days. The CEO has also shared the company’s “Secret Mercor Master Plan”.

They are also hiring, and you can find a link to the role below.

News

"Napster pioneered music sharing over 25 years ago. It just got bought for $207 million" - The OG peer-to-peer music sharing platform that disrupted the music industry a quarter-century ago has been acquired by Infinite Reality to create 3D virtual music spaces for fans. Don’t call it a comeback yet. CNBC

"Match Group CEO admits dating apps feel too much like ‘a numbers game’ so he’s asking employees for ‘unvarnished feedback’ on how to improve Hinge and Tinder" - Marketplaces are all about matching, and it’s in the company name. The unique problem of dating apps is that they have a positive churn if they do their job well. The churn dynamic isn’t necessarily bad but can create a moral hazard when optimizing for MRR. A plethora of choices can have perceived value to the customer, but it might keep them from finding a match, too. Fortune

"Flexport accuses former employees of stealing its source code to create a rival startup" - The logistics platform has filed a lawsuit alleging intellectual property theft by former employees who started Freightmate. TechCrunch

"DoorDash Partners with Klarna to Offer US Customers Even More Convenience with Flexible Payments" - You can now pay for your food in installments. This partnership is part of a larger push by Klarna ahead of its IPO and on the heels of its deal with Walmart. DoorDash

"Edible Brands Launches Edibles.com" - The company behind Edible Arrangements is entering the hemp products market with a new delivery marketplace platform. Corporate marketplaces continue to be popular for growth. PR Newswire

"Ulta Beauty to launch Mirakl-powered marketplace in 2025" - The beauty retailer is expanding its business model to include a third-party marketplace, joining other major retailers in this strategic shift to corporate marketplaces. Mirakl

"LG to Shut Down NFT Marketplace Art Lab on Smart TVs by June" - This seems like a vestige of the Covid-era NFT boom. It's a bit wild that this ever got built. Decrypt

“Greg Brown, the CEO of Udemy, steps down” - Greg Brown announces his departure from the learning marketplace and will be replaced by Hugo Sarrazin. LinkedIn

"Deliveroo makes annual profit for first time" - The food delivery company earned a small profit in 2024. The Guardian

“Bounce now has more locations than Burger King 💪” - The luggage storage marketplace has 20,000 locations across 100+ countries. LinkedIn

Fundraising

Pickle raises $12M Series A led by FirstMark and Craft Ventures. Pickle is a peer-to-peer fashion rental app. Fortune

SaySo raises $4M Seed led by UP.Partners. SaySo creates co-branded buying experiences for retailers to offload excess inventory directly from warehouses. Yahoo Finance

Recess raises $1.75M pre-seed round led by Baukunst. Recess is a marketplace for parents to find after-school classes and camps. LinkedIn

Whop raises unannounced Series B at $800M valuation led by Bain Capital Ventures. Whop is a marketplace and storefront for creators to sell all sorts of goods and services. Arthur Rock on X says the company is at $80M GMV with a 4-6% take rate. Twitter/X

AMT raises $3.5M Seed round led by NFX. The AI-powered company aims to be the Google AdWords for influencers, e.g., a marketplace to connect advertisers and influencers. TechCrunch

Reads

“When Brokers Become the Marketplace” - This is an excellent read on the future of agent-led marketplaces from Jared Rosner, an investor who works with Elad Gil.

J-Blog

When Brokers Become the Marketplace

AI brokers is one of the most under-discussed opportunities in startups today. AI brokers can create a new set of marketplaces. This is because broker markets consolidate when transactions can be fully automated. Think of how Google became the world’s largest ad broker or how online stockbrokers like E*Trade and Robinhood took over retail trading…

Read more

a year ago · 26 likes · Jared Rosner

"Wonders' COO Tony Hoggett Talks Grubhub" - An insightful discussion on the evolving food delivery landscape and strategic partnerships. The Curbivore

"Our 2025 Annual Consumer Trend Report" - Forerunner's comprehensive analysis of emerging consumer behaviors and market opportunities for the coming year. Forerunner

"A Commerce Evolution: Agentic Commerce as the New Frontier" - A thought-provoking exploration of how AI agents are transforming online shopping and marketplace dynamics. Medium

"The SEO Maturity Curve: Where Does Your Strategy Stand?" - A practical framework for evaluating and evolving your marketplace's search engine optimization approach from RVShare's SVP of Marketing. Martijn Scheijbeler

Watch or Listen

“Flexport CEO on Tariff Drama, Supply Chain Conspiracies, and Hard-Earned CEO Wisdom” - The founder of Flexport, Ryan Petersen, shares some great insights on tariffs and how Flexport is navigating them.

"Building Defensible Marketplaces: Network Effects & AI with Pete Flint" - It's always great to listen to the folks at NFX. Sharetribe

"Apartment Marketplace" - A podcast episode with Matthew Woods, CEO of Apartment List, and Mike Williams of Everything Marketplaces.

Marketplace Jobs

• Field Sales (Outside Sales) Representative - hampr

• Software Engineering Manager - Boom & Bucket

• Strategic Projects Lead - Mercor

• Senior Manager, Host Acquisition and Onboarding - Peerspace

• Manager, Digital Ordering - Strategy & Operations - DoorDash

• Senior Product Manager – Data - StubHub

• Content Marketing Specialist - Downstream

• Business Development Representative - Sotira

• Creator Partnerships Lead - Whop

Want to see your job listed here? Email colin@yonder.vc with the subject line “Job Posting” to be included or get your job featured!

Thanks for reading!

That is a wrap for the week! As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any missed feedback or news. Hot tips are always welcome. Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you want to book a call, you can find me on Intro.

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About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a long-time advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he was the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, Justanswer, and the Federal Reserve. 

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👋 Welcome to the 7th edition of the Marketplace Memo. My goal is to share curated news, content, and stories I am seeing related to marketplaces with a splash of color from me. Please enjoy and share with others!

The Marketplace Time Forgot (And Still Can't Kill)

Let’s take a trip down memory lane. Thirty years ago, on March 1st, 1995, Craig Newmark sent a simple email to friends listing upcoming events in San Francisco. This humble beginning marked the birth of Craigslist, one of the web's first peer-to-peer marketplaces, launching in the same pivotal year as both eBay (September 3rd) and Amazon (July 16th). This convergence of marketplace innovation in 1995 highlights how technological windows often open simultaneously, with multiple entrepreneurs recognizing and acting on similar opportunities.

Craigslist revolutionized classified advertising by offering a predominantly free alternative to newspaper listings. This disruptive model devastated traditional print media, costing newspapers an estimated $5 billion in classified ad revenue between 2000 and 2007. While charging only for specific categories like job postings in major cities and housing listings in high-demand markets, Craigslist created a lean operation that generated substantial returns with minimal overhead. The business weathered significant changes in the digital landscape, seeing revenue fluctuate from nearly $1 billion in 2018 to $566 million during 2020 before stabilizing at $694 million by 2023—all while maintaining a minimal staff of about 50 employees.

The platform's minimalistic design and hands-off approach—eschewing integrated payments, shipping, user ratings, or safety mechanisms—established a libertarian marketplace philosophy that many modern platforms have abandoned. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), Craigslist maintained resilience in the face of well-funded competitors like Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp, Letgo, Mercari, and Nextdoor, all of which have attempted to modernize the local commerce experience with slicker interfaces and added protections.

Craigslist remains a testament to the staying power of simplicity in marketplace design. Even as it ceded ground to specialized competitors, as of 2023, the platform continued to attract over 560 million monthly visits across 570 cities in 70 countries. This endurance demonstrates a fundamental truth in marketplace dynamics: network effects are challenging to disrupt once they are humming.

There's something nostalgic about Craigslist's wild west days—meeting a stranger in a random parking lot to buy something, scanning Missed Connections, or rolling the dice on a too-good-to-be-true apartment listing.

The Highlight

The moment when a digital upstart finally dethrones a physical retail giant happened in Q4 2024, as Amazon's quarterly revenue reached $188 billion, decisively surpassing Walmart's $181 billion. It only took thirty years!

This crossing point isn't just a statistical milestone—it represents a fundamental shift in retail power decades in the making. From Q1 2015, Walmart grew a respectable 57.2% over these nine years (4.7% CAGR), while Amazon exploded with a staggering 726.7% growth rate (24.2% CAGR). With that said, Walmart is still projected to have higher annual revenue.

This chart perfectly captures the culmination of Jeff Bezos' famous 1997 shareholder letter philosophy of prioritizing long-term market leadership over short-term profitability. This strategy transformed an online bookstore into the world's retail leader despite starting from just one-fifth of Walmart's revenue less than a decade ago. Long live e-commerce!

h/t Sebastian Vaessen and Dealroom.co for the chart. 🙏

News

• "Prosus to acquire Just Eat Takeaway.com for €4.1bn" - Prosus continues to invest in/consolidate companies in the food delivery space, which is massive. Through consolidation, I expect they will continue to drive efficiency and market ownership. This LinkedIn post from Ervin Tu, the CIO, has a presentation sharing more. Prosus

• Booking Holdings Reports Fourth Quarter 2024 Financial Results - Booking Holdings reported $165.6B in GMV for 2024, up 10% vs. $81.8B for Airbnb. Revenue grew 11% to $23.7 billion, while net income improved 37% to $5.9 billion. The company pointed out that alternative accommodations helped drive the growth. The company is also leaning heavily into AI internally and was one of the first partners for OpenAI’s Operator.

  

• Grindr Announces $500 Million Buyback as It Beats on 2024 Sales - The dating marketplace is implementing a significant stock repurchase program after exceeding revenue expectations. Grindr

• "David's Bridal Taps New CEO, Plans to Build Online Marketplace" - The wedding dress retailer is pivoting to a marketplace model under new leadership. CNBC

• "Uber CEO Says Musk Wants to Go Alone on Tesla Robotaxi Rollout" - The battle lines have been drawn in the AV driving wars. Bloomberg

• "Tesla Sets Sights on Waymo, Uber in California Ride-Hail Bid" - The first shot across the bow was fired. Tesla is moving to enter the California ride-hailing market, positioning itself as a competitor to established players. Bloomberg

• “Airbnb CBO: AI Will Enable a ‘Concierge in Your Pocket’”- Airbnb’s CBO Dave Stephenson shared at a conference that AI is a top priority for Airbnb to integrate into its product. PYMNTS

• Introducing LaborUp: The AI-Powered Marketplace for Construction Work - The labor marketplace for manufacturing workers officially launches. LinkedIn

• AppSump Launches SumoFlow - The software deal marketplace is launching the waitlist for its new product, SumoFlow, which allows customers to purchase ready-to-use AI-powered workflows that deliver specific business outcomes with no SaaS subscription. Read the LinkedIn post from the product team. Website: SumoFlow

• “FlyFlat — new favorite product for premium flights” - According to Arfur Rock (anon VC X account), the new service you can text to book flights end-to-end is doing $17M ARR, 4x YoY, profitable, raising Seed. FJ Labs is an early backer at pre-seed. X

Fundraising

• Highstock raises $5.5M Seed round led by Greylock - Highstock is a marketplace for overstock inventory and is framing itself as the “Bloomberg terminal for unsold inventory”. Greylock

• Cafler raises $11M Series A led by Copec WIND Ventures - The company is building a one-click solution for automotive maintenance and repair services. LinkedIn

• HeyMilo raises $2.2 Million Seed led by Canaan Partners - The recruitment marketplace uses AI agents to transform the hiring process. HeyMilo

Reads

• "The Next 10 Years Will Be About the AI Agent Economy" - NFX explores how AI agents interact via marketplaces and that building for that reality will be necessary. NFX

• "How This Travel Company Went From Bootstrapped Startup to a $2 Billion Valuation" - GetYourGuide co-founder and CEO Johannes Reck talks about how they built the business and bootstrapped for the first four years. Inc

• “Our SMB Thesis” - A very insightful post from Slow Ventures highlighting their thesis of empowering entrepreneurs and SMBs.

  99% Derisible

  Our SMB Thesis

  This week I published my SMB thesis deck outlining how specifically we’re backing these companies (and we’ve been aggressive here…

  Read more

  a year ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Yoni Rechtman

• "Flexport Release Winter 2025" - Ryan Peterson, the CEO/Founder of Flexport, shares what they are releasing. The big product release is Flexport Intelligence, a new suite of AI tools to power your supply chain. X

• "The Next Frontier of Circular Economy Innovation" - Interplay Ventures looks at what is next for the retail sector regarding inventory management and overstock. Interplay

• "Measuring Market Fragmentation with HHI and C4" - SNAK Venture Partners discusses assessing market fragmentation when evaluating marketplace opportunities. SNAK VC

SNAK Venture Partners Perspectives

#09 Measuring Market Fragmentation with HHI and C4

At SNAK we are most excited about in investing in marketplaces in markets that have high fragmentation, as we believe this characteristic increases the value of using technology to more efficiently match supply and demand, creates a higher need for an intermediary to provide safety and trust between unknown parties, and allows for an independent party t…

Read more

a year ago · Sonia Nagar

• “Marketplace Startup Fundraising 2025” - My post from last week covering what is happening in the fundraising market for marketplace startups. I share benchmarks from Carta across Seed, Series A, and B.

Watch or Listen

• "Oscar Pierre, Glovo CEO & Founder: Selling 30% for €100K |The McDonald's Deal That Saved Them" - A great interview with the CEO of Glovo on 20VC, unpacking the founding story that was anything but easy. He goes deeply into the mechanics of food delivery, but two points stand out: being the first market entrant and reaching scale. To achieve this, you need speed, and a culture of speed matters.

• "Redefining Hospitality: Michael Wolf's Success at Resort Pass" - Patrick McGinnis (coined FOMO) interviewed Michael Wolf about Resort Pass.

• "Chris Josephs: Nancy Pelosi, Dan Crenshaw, and How They Get Rich at Your Expense"—Tucker Carlson interviews Chris Josephs of Autopilot about their politician copy-trading marketplace. They discuss the pivot from their original app and how they came to build the viral marketplace they have now.

• "Betting Big on B2B Marketplaces with Sonia Nagar" - A great interview about the future of B2B marketplaces with two VCs I respect immensely.

• “Insights From Launching Facebook Marketplace With Deb Liu” - Mike Willians from Everything Marketplaces talks with Deb Liu about her insights from building Facebook Marketplace and more.

Marketplace Jobs

• Project & Campaign Manager - Landfolk

• Head of Fleet Sales - Truck Parking Club

• Manager, Product Design - Crexi

• Senior Software Engineer, Backend / Full Stack - RxPost

• Community Manager and Social Media - PublicSquare

• Full Stack Engineer - Bubble Goods

• SVP of Revenue - Ghost

• Chief Compliance Officer - Autopilot

• Marketing Manager - Autopilot

• Sales Development Representative - Gumption

• Head of Advisor Performance & Development - Fora

Want to see your job listed here? Email colin@yonder.vc with the subject line “Job Posting” to be included or get your job featured!

Thanks for reading!

That is a wrap for the week! As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any missed feedback or news. Hot tips are always welcome. Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you want to book a call, you can find me on Intro.

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This post was brought to you by…

Longtail - Solving Marketplace SEO So You Don’t Have To

The best time to start SEO was yesterday. Start today and keep your development team focused on your product with out-of-the-box programmatic solutions. Get organic growth quicker and without sacrifice.

Learn More

About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a long-time advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he was the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, Justanswer, and the Federal Reserve. 

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A Tale of Two Fundraising Realities

If my 2023 report was all about a pullback from the exuberance of 2021, then 2025 has crystallized into a market with dual realities. On one side, we have AI-native marketplaces growing exceptionally fast and raising astronomical sums at valuations that would make even 2021-era founders blush. On the other, we have “traditional” marketplaces facing a financial environment that has become increasingly focused on unit economics, profitability paths, and capital efficiency.

Consider Mercor’s $32M Series A at a $250M valuation with “tens of millions” in annualized revenue run rate and now $100M Series B at a $2B valuation with $75M in annualized revenue run rate. I am pretty sure the “revenue” is Gross Service Value (GSV), and if we assume that, then the $2B valuation is 27x GSV with an 8x increase in valuation (someone please correct me if this is wrong). The company is growing fast and reported 51% MoM over the last six months. Did I mention they are profitable and have up to a 30% take rate?

Meanwhile, other “traditional” marketplace startups like Whatnot have raised a $265M Series E at a $4.97B valuation, doing $3B in GMV. At a ~10% take rate, this is $300M in net revenue, which implies a valuation of 16.5x net revenue or 1.65x GMV. Another example is Fay, which has raised $50M Series B at a $500M valuation and has surpassed $50M in GSV. The implied GSV multiple is 10x or lower. Mercor is growing faster and earlier-stage, but there is a big difference in forward-looking multiples.

The stark contrast illuminates our current reality: AI has created a parallel fundraising universe. That said, not all non-AI marketplaces face the same uphill battle. Subsectors like excess inventory (Ghost / Max Retail / HighStock / Sotira), prediction markets (Kalshi / Polymarket), healthcare (Fay /Berry Street), and social commerce are islands of opportunity in a challenging ocean for most marketplace founders.

The new normal has arrived for everyone else, and it looks a lot like...the old normal.

Revenue rules all.

Marketplaces must demonstrate straightforward unit economics, capital efficiency, and realistic paths to profitability. We’ve returned to these fundamentals with a vengeance. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Marketplace deal volume seems to have reverted to 2020 levels, while dollar volume and valuations are rising or surpassing pandemic levels.

Given that backdrop, I wanted to share early-stage data from Carta, SVB, AngelList, Foreruner, and FJ Labs to help founders and investors calibrate. I also throw in some of my observations and valuations in the early-stage rounds I am seeing. Hopefully, this can help founders raise better and illuminate for investors what the “market” for marketplace valuations is. Note that data is most applicable to the US.

Marketplace Fundraising By the Numbers

Let’s examine the data to determine our exact position in 2025. I am excited to partner with Carta again to visualize the marketplace funding landscape compared to SaaS and Fintech across funding stages. You are missing out if you don’t follow Peter Walker at Carta! Be sure to subscribe to their newsletter.

If you haven’t subscribed to Carta’s Data Insights, please do so!

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Seed Stage Fundraising Volume

The dollar volume of seed-stage deals improved from H1 to H2 2024. However, actual deals done have continued to drop or remain flat. The increased dollar and flat deal volume point to fewer but bigger deals, likely correlating with more traction. Marketplace deals recovered somewhat in 2024-2025, with approximately 27 deals in H2 2024 versus just 25 in H1 2023. The deal volume is still dramatically below the 70+ deals we saw in the peak quarters of 2021/2022 and even lower than in 2020. Dollar volume recovered to $81M in H2 vs $70M in H1 of 2024.

Combining the dollar and deal volume, we get the implied average deal size, which in H2 2024 was $3M for marketplaces, $3.89M for Fintech, and $4.28M for SaaS. Even without the pandemic euphoria, the average deal size for marketplaces at Seed has steadily risen, likely pulling up valuations while founders try to maintain ~20% dilution and reflecting greater traction.

Seed Stage Valuations

Seed-stage marketplace median pre-money valuations have surprisingly been very stable since H1 of 2021 and, dare I say, increasing in 2024! Looking at Fintech and SaaS, we can see upward inertia on valuations due to several factors but likely driven by companies having more traction at Seed and general inflation. As noted in the deal size chart, we are seeing a steady rise, implying that post-money valuations are also rising. For H2 2024, fuzzy math would suggest a $16.3M median post-money valuation at Seed.

Series A Volume

Series A marketplace funding rounds remain depressed relatively to the peak, with only 18 deals in H2 2024 (the same levels as 2020) vs 25 in H2 2023. So, in some sense, the marketplace deal volume might be down, peak to trough, but it is back at pre-pandemic levels. SaaS and Fintech have faired better with deal volume up in 2024 over 2023 and at or above 2020. Outside of Fintech, total capital invested has grown proportionally faster, indicating larger rounds for fewer companies—another sign of investor selectivity and concentration.

Series A check sizes have decreased for marketplaces and are 20% above 2020 at $6.8M vs $5.6M. The Series A deal size contrasts with Seed rounds, which have shown upward trending. That said, H1 2024 saw a pop in the average check size, likely driven by an outlier.

Series A Valuations

Series A valuations for marketplaces appear well above those of prior years. H1 of 2024 is a notable high point in the data, with a median valuation of $52.5M. We are likely starting to see the impact of AI deals here, but we will also see more revenue maturity when a Series A is raised. Another interesting trend is that H2 valuations for marketplaces are much lower than H1 valuations (founders, take note).

Series B Volume

The Series B market shows many of the same trends as Seed and Series A and appears to improve. Marketplaces raised $420M across 20 deals in 2024, which is above 2020 and, on a dollar basis, up 24%. We saw the same thing in the Series A data showing that from the 2021 peak, marketplaces are down in volume but are back at the pre-pandemic levels and up on a dollar basis. The marketplace trend contrasts Fintech and SaaS, which are still down in deal volume, with only SaaS up in dollar terms.

Series B average check sizes for marketplaces are at $21M, up from 2023 ($15.3M) and 2020 ($18.9M). Again, this is likely a function of greater traction by the time the companies reach Series B and the relatively higher valuations they can get.

Series B Valuations

Series B median pre-money valuations for marketplaces are rising and have surpassed 2021 levels. After falling from a peak of $152.3M in 2021 to $100M in 2023, they’ve increased to $165.3M in 2024. SaaS has followed a similar path but hasn’t exceeded 2021 levels. Fintech has remained flat at 2020 and 2023 levels.

Summarizing Marketplace Fundraising in 2024

So what is the takeaway from all of this for marketplaces? Here is the tl;dr:

• Seed

  • $ Volume: Rising ⬆️

  • Deal Volume: Flat ➡️

  • Pre-Money Valuations: Flat to rising ➡️

• Series A

  • $ Volume: Rising ⬆️

  • Deal Volume: Flat ➡️

  • Pre-Money Valuations: Rising ⬆️

• Series B

  • $ Volume: Rising ⬆️

  • Deal Volume: Flat ➡️

  • Pre-Money Valuations: Rising ⬆️

The marketplace fundraising market has seemingly bottomed out, and we are rising. Every stage, from Seed to Series B, is seeing an increased dollar funding volume, though deal volume has reverted to 2020 levels. Pre-money valuations are rising for later-stage deals, with Seed showing signs of improving. All signs point to a higher bar for traction at each round now, meaning founders need to have more revenue now to raise the same round they would have in 2021/2022.

Let’s talk about revenue…

Revenue Requirements to Raise a Round: 2021 vs. 2024

Every marketplace founder is feeling the pinch right now regarding traction benchmarks. I see a lot at Seed, and it is almost every week that I have conversations with founders at $1M in net revenue who are hoping to raise a Series A, and I have to break the bad news to them. The ground has shifted, and the hurdle rate has shifted from $1M in net revenue to $2-3M with a fast growth rate. The jump in the revenue benchmarks is a big one, and most founders are now considering how they can go further with less capital.

According to SVB’s State of the Markets report, the revenue thresholds needed to raise have increased dramatically. In 2021, the median tech company could raise a Series A with just $1.4M in annual revenue, but by 2024, this had jumped 75% to $2.5M. The Series B threshold increased from $5M to $6M (a 20% increase), while Series C has remained relatively stable at around $14M.

Converting this to GMV to put the required traction in context can also be helpful for marketplaces. Using typical marketplace take rates of 10-15% for consumer marketplaces and 5-10% for B2B platforms, here’s what this means in GMV terms:

Series A Revenue Requirements

• 2021: $1.4M revenue → $9-14M GMV (consumer), $14-28M GMV (B2B)

• 2024: $2.5M revenue → $17-25M GMV (consumer), $25-50M GMV (B2B)

Series B Revenue Requirements

• 2021: $5M revenue → $33-50M GMV (consumer), $50-100M GMV (B2B)

• 2024: $6M revenue → $40-60M GMV (consumer), $60-120M GMV (B2B)

Series C Revenue Requirements

• 2021: $14.2M revenue → $95-142M GMV (consumer), $142-284M GMV (B2B)

• 2024: $13.8M revenue → $92-138M GMV (consumer), $138-276M GMV (B2B)

The SVB data also shows a decline in growth rates at the time of funding across all stages. Series A companies raised with median growth rates of around 70% in 2024, down from 170% in 2021. Series B companies saw growth rates of about 60% in 2024, down from 120% in 2021. The lower growth rates at the time of funding reflect investors’ increased focus on sustainable unit economics rather than growth at all costs.

What Other VCs Are Seeing

One of my favorite resources is from Fabrice Grinda of FJ Labs, and I call it the “Holy Grail” of marketplace fundraising. Their marketplace fundraising benchmarks are excellent and representative for the last few years. I also checked with the FJ team on the benchmarks; they feel they are still representative.

The numbers provided reflect median ranges, though, as Fabrice notes: “There are many exceptions, especially on the higher end. In other words, the standard deviation is rather high. A second-time successful founder can raise at a much higher valuation. A company growing much quicker than the average can often “skip a stage” and have its Series A look like a Series B or its Series B look like a Series C.”

For valuations, we can see that Seed pre-money valuations at the top end of the range align with the reported Carta medians for H2 2024 at $13.1M vs. $12M in the table. For Series A and B, we are seeing departures on valuation with $42.8M (Carta) vs $30M (FJ) for Series A and $165.3M (Carta) vs $80M (FJ) for Series B. As noted above, the median valuations for Series A and B are nearing or above pandemic levels, which Seed has reverted closer to 2020 levels.

One of the most important takeaways from the benchmarks is the implied growth rate and valuation step-ups. Note that the typical timeframe between rounds is 12-24 months, with Fabrice noting 18 months as an implied expectation in his original article:

• Seed → Series A - 5x growth in monthly net revenue, with 2.5x valuation step-up

• Series A → Series B - 4x growth, with ~2.7x valuation step-up

• Series B → Series C - >2.5x growth, with 2.5x valuation step-up

Comparing this to the SVB data, Series A growth is 1.7x, Series B is 1.6x, and Series C is 1.7x. Based on experience, these numbers feel low, but they represent the whole startup market, not marketplaces specifically. For marketplaces, I still think the implied growth rates from FJ Labs provided a solid guideline of what founders should strive for to get venture funding, e.g., get a deal done.

What Is Colin Seeing?

My vantage point is as the GP of Yonder (pre-seed/seed marketplace VC) and a long-time advisor to marketplaces. Looking at my deal CRM, I have looked at 400+ marketplace deals in 2024 and 2025 so far. Here is my pulse check on what I see regarding funded deals. Please note that this is relatively anecdotal.

The Series A No Man’s Land

The most dramatic change I’m observing is what I call the “Series A No Man’s Land.” As we saw from the SVB data, the median revenue for a Series A right now is $2.5M, up from $1.4M, a 75% increase. Many marketplaces are sitting around $1-2M in net revenue and have to figure out how to get to $2.5-3M in revenue with less capital while maintaining a solid growth rate to get a “clean” Series A.

Forerunner’s excellent analysis, Our Source of Truth on Marketplaces, shows that on a cohort basis, we have been seeing a decline of marketplaces raising Series A, with only 14 marketplaces in 2022, down from peaks of 89 in 2015 and 73 in 2018. The seed-to-series-A chasm is the one to cross in 2025, which will be tricky to navigate.

Companies in this zone face a brutal reality: they can live on their money, bootstrap, take a flat or down round/extension, downsize to profitability, and/or explore creative financing structures. Many combinations work, but any path they choose means being more efficient, monetizing better, and going further with less.

Marketplace Business Model Trends

• Labor Marketplace Resurgence in the AI Era - One fascinating development has been the renaissance of labor marketplaces in our AI-powered economy. I see substantial investment in platforms that effectively combine human talent with AI capabilities.

• Excess Inventory Marketplaces Heat Up - Another hot sector is excess and surplus inventory with lots of potential. These marketplaces solve genuine economic inefficiencies at a vast scale, often with impressive take rates and strong unit economics from day one - music to investors’ ears in this environment. We have already seen several funding rounds happen:

  • Ghost raised a $40M Series B

  • Max Retail raised a $15M Series A

  • Sotira’s raised a $2M round

  • HighStock raised a $5.5M Seed

• B2B Marketplaces are on the Rise—Perhaps the most notable macro shift I’m witnessing is the strong investor preference for B2B marketplaces over consumer-focused platforms. The pendulum began swinging toward B2B around 2022 but accelerated dramatically in 2025. The Dealroom/Adevinta report from early 2024 captured this shift at its inflection point, showing B2B marketplaces attracted an all-time high 20% of marketplace funding in 2023.

Pre-Seed/Seed Market Reality Check

If I had to break down valuations for marketplaces in the pre-seed/seed market in 2025, here’s what I’m seeing pre-money:

• Pre-product - $4-6M

• Post-product and No Revenue - $6-8M

• Post-product and Early Revenue - $8-12M

• Post-product and Year-ish+ of Revenue - $10-20M

• Add $2-4M+ for repeat founders, hot growth, and new vertical

However, adding “AI” in a truly integrated and defensible way can increase the number by 30-50% or even more.

Conclusion: The New Fundamentals

In 2025, marketplace fundraising has come full circle. After the exuberance of 2021, the correction of 2022-2023, and the AI-fueled bifurcation of 2024, we’ve arrived at 2025, which, in many ways, looks like 2021 again.

For founders building in this environment, the playbook is straightforward but challenging:

1. Focus relentlessly on unit economics and contribution margin from day one.

2. Build with capital efficiency as a core principle, not an afterthought.

3. Demonstrate clear paths to profitability even while pursuing growth.

4. If incorporating AI, ensure it creates defensible moats rather than surface-level features.

5. Prepare for longer fundraising cycles and higher bars at each stage.

The good news is that great companies are still getting funded. The flight to quality means that truly exceptional marketplace businesses face less competition for capital and attention.

I remain very optimistic about the marketplace model. The inherent network effects, scaling advantages, and capital efficiency (when done right) continue to create compelling investment opportunities. The winners of this cycle will be built differently - with stronger fundamentals, more innovative monetization strategies, and deeper technology moats - but they will emerge stronger for having navigated these challenging waters.

What do you see in the marketplace fundraising environment? Please share your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to hear from founders and investors about their experiences in 2025.

Lastly, sharing is caring! 🙏

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Thanks for reading!

As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any comments and feedback. Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you want to book a call, you can find me on Intro. If you like this content, please consider supporting me by becoming a paid subscriber!

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About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a long-time advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he was the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, Justanswer, and the Federal Reserve.

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👋 Welcome to the 6th edition of the Marketplace Memo. My goal is to share curated news, content, and stories I am seeing related to marketplaces with a splash of color from me. Please enjoy and share with others!

The Speed of Marketplace Scale

When marketplaces hit, they hit fast. This week's fundraising announcements highlight a pattern that's impossible to ignore in marketplace businesses—the rapid compression of fundraising timelines once product-market fit is achieved. Take Mercor, for example, which grew 6,400% year over year after its Series A, or Temu's meteoric rise to $50B in GMV just two years after launch. It isn’t always immediately, but when market pull kicks in, be ready.

This acceleration creates an interesting dynamic in early-stage marketplace investing. At the pre-seed stage, it's notoriously difficult to predict which marketplaces will achieve escape velocity or when. The metrics are often too early to be meaningful, and the true potential of the network effects isn't yet visible. However, once a marketplace successfully matches supply and demand in a way that creates real value for both sides, growth can be explosive as this inflection point is hit. This acceleration or hockey-stick growth makes investing more obvious, which makes the Seed, Series A, and B rounds highly competitive.

For marketplaces, product-market fit manifests uniquely - it's about finding that sweet spot where supply and demand connect and transact, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of transactions. When this happens, the growth curve can steepen dramatically. From my time working in marketplaces, scaling should feel like monkeys on a rocket ship - chaotic, fast, and a bit out of control. Your job is to remove the obstacles to growth as the market will pull you.

The challenge for investors, particularly at pre-seed, is identifying which marketplaces have the right conditions for this exponential growth. It's about looking beyond current metrics to evaluate the fundamental dynamics that could enable rapid scaling once the initial supply-demand match is achieved. For founders, this means being prepared for that moment of acceleration - having the infrastructure, team, and capital to harness the momentum when it arrives.

The Highlight of the Week

When you think you have seen everything, a new app pops up in your feed…

This time, it is "Uber with guns." And it’s no joke. It has reached the top three on the app store. 🤯 So what is this app? It is a marketplace for protection where you can book armed bodyguards. See more on Twitter/X.

But this is not an ordinary app—the Midas Touch of Nikita Bier graces it. If you don’t know Nikita, he is known for co-founding viral social apps like TBH, which was acquired by Facebook, and Gas, which Discord acquired. He is also masterful at trolling on X. The app is life in LA and NYC, with cool features like picking the guard’s attire and renting multiple cars to have a motorcade. 

News

"Redfin Partners with Zillow Amid Layoffs" - The digital brokerage is outsourcing its rental division to Zillow and significantly downsizing its staff. puts it well on his LinkedIn post: “It's very hard to compete with a marketplace once it hits scale.” If you can’t beat them, join them. Seattle Times

"Getaround Abruptly Shuts Down US Car-sharing Operations" - The publicly traded peer-to-peer car-sharing marketplace is still around but has pulled the plug on the US. TechCrunch

"Turo Scraps Plans for an IPO" - On the heels of the Getaround shutdown, the other car-sharing marketplace has postponed its plans to go public amid market uncertainty and company performance. TechCrunch

Bryan Petro steps into the CEO role at Getmyboat - Leadership change at the boat-sharing marketplace. LinkedIn

HomeToGo acquires Interhome - The vacation rental marketplace acquired Europe’s second-largest vacation rental management company. It's an interesting move to own and potentially roll up the supply. LinkedIn

Airbnb Q4 2024 Shareholder Letter Released - $17.6B in GMV for Q4, growing at 13% YoY. The company is massive, but growth is slowing. It begs the question of what they do next. How do they expand the TAM? Well, it seems they have been rebuilding the platform for the business. The letter states: “With this new tech platform, we can innovate faster and expand beyond short-term rentals into an extensible platform with a range of new offerings.” Currently, there are stays and experiences; it will be interesting to see what they pick next. Typical travel categories would include flights and rental cars or even expanding into hotels. Airbnb might just be starting its OTA era. Airbnb

"Airbnb CEO Says It's Still Too Early for AI Trip Planning" - This is probably right, but I have to imagine they are working hard on this internally, and if not, they are just leaving the door open for disruption. TechCrunch

Rare Candy reaches 25M Pokemon card scans - The Pokemon marketplace app introduced card-collecting features in the middle of 2024 and has 30x active users. Product market fit is a fantastic thing. LinkedIn

Fundraising

Mercor raises $100M Series B at $2B Valuation led by Felicis with participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst, DST Global, and Menlo Ventures. This valuation is a whopping 8x what the company received on its Series A in 2024. Mercor is an AI recruiting marketplace. A podcast exclusive about the fund round from 20VC is below. TechCrunch

Clutch secures $50M Series D led by Altos. Clutch is Canada’s largest online used car seller, which rebounded from a recap in 2023 and is now poised for growth. Additional color here from long-time investor FJ Labs. BNN Bloomberg

Coll-X raises $10M Series A led by Bobby Witt Jr., Brand Foundry, and 114 Ventures. Coll-X is a trading card marketplace app. CLLCT

Metycle raises $14.7M Series A led by 2150 along with DFF Ventures, Market One Capital, Partech, and Project A. Metcycle is an AI-powered metal recycling marketplace based in Germany. Recycling Today

Fetii raises $7.35M Seed led by Mark Cuban, with participation from Y Combinator, Goodwater Capital. Fetii is a group ridesharing platform. TechCrunch

Hydra Host raises a Seed+ led by Flume Ventures, NEA, and Saga Ventures. Hydra Host is a GPU rental marketplace. Hydra Host

Did I miss one? Email colin@yonder.vc with the subject line “Fundraising Announcement” to be included.

Reads

The Rule of 40 vs. Valuation multiples for marketplaces - This is an excellent chart by dealroom.co and Flow partners, which shows the marketplaces with higher Rule of 40 percentages also tend to have higher multiples. This chart indicates that classified models tend to have the highest Rule of 40 number and valuation, though they might be capped on overall enterprise size. LinkedIn

Social commerce is changing how we buy online - Here is another great chart from the dealroom.co team, highlighting how TikTok shop alone changes how we buy online. Dealroom

Fiverr launches a platform for freelancers to train a custom AI model and sell the output - Olivia Moore shares an X thread on the new feature, and it will be fascinating to see how it works out. Given how AI heavily impacts labor marketplaces, I view this as an inevitable evolution. Twitter/X

“Procurement Led Marketplaces” - Another insightful post from SNAK Venture Partners on how procurement marketplaces are having a moment with AI. It is a big space, and according to their post, the “U.S. wholesale trade agent and broker industry was $774.5 billion in 2024.”

SNAK Venture Partners Perspectives

#06 Procurement Led Marketplaces

We’ve previously talked about our B2B marketplace thesis, our interest in recycling, and now want to share another theme we’re excited about – procurement led marketplaces…

Read more

a year ago · 2 likes · Sonia Nagar

“A Fully Loaded Approach to Analyzing Marketplaces” - The Headline team has shared a comprehensive framework for evaluating marketplace businesses. Headline

"The Venture Capital Funnel" - Peter Walker from Carta shares insights on graduation rates of startups. Founders and investors take note! LinkedIn

“The Founder's Toolkit #1: Starting Your Fundraising and Building Your Investor Pipeline” - A post from yours truly on how to run a fundraising process and build an investor pipeline (with a free CRM template!).

Watch or Listen

"An Interview with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi" - A banger of a discussion about Uber, Dara, aggregation strategies, and the future of autonomous vehicles in ridesharing. Stratechery

"Adarsh Hiremath, Co-Founder & CTO @ Mercor: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley" - A great episode of 20VC with the CTO of Mercor diving into the Mercor story. This episode is worth listening to to understand the companies ’s story and how network effects are even more critical in the era of AI. Twenty Minute VC

“Peer-to-Peer #2: $800B Excess Inventory Market With Amantha Bagdon of RxPost and Amrita Bhasin of Sotira” - Amantha of RxPost and Amrita of Sotira talk about their experiences building excess inventory marketplaces in pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods as well as the lessons they learned. Take Rate

"Founders and Speed Funding Scalable Marketplaces with Jeroen Arts" - Discussion on marketplace funding strategies and scalability challenges. Sharetribe

"Kirsten Green’s $500M Bet on Consumer AI" - A great interview with Kristen Green of Forerunner, a big investor in consumer marketplaces. YouTube

“Investing in Marketplaces” - I know, I know one more thing with me in it! This was a fun podcast to record, specifically about investing in marketplaces.

Marketplace Jobs

• Head of Growth, Self-serve Marketplace - Blip

• Senior Product Manager, Multiple Openings - Faire

• Art Director - Intro

• Category Manager of Trading Cards - eBay

• Head of Engineering - Offsite

• Account Executive - FreshX

• Product Marketing Manager, New Use Cases - DoorDash

• Marketing Manager (Sneakers, Streetwear & Vintage) - Whatnot

• Supply Acquisition Manager II, Campgrounds - Hipcamp

Want to see your job listed here? Email colin@yonder.vc with the subject line “Job Posting” to be included or get your job featured!

Thanks for reading!

That is a wrap for the week! As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any missed feedback or news. Hot tips are always welcome. Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you want to book a call, you can find me on Intro.

Share

About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a long-time advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he was the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, Justanswer, and the Federal Reserve. 

Hi, it’s Colin! Welcome to the 216 new subscribers who joined Take Rate since the last Peer-to-Peer. I am excited to have you join the 2,830+ marketplace founders, operators, and investors who subscribe. Join the fun! 👇

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Episode #2 of Peer-to-Peer is live!

We are still in the startup phase with the live recordings here (jump ahead to 00:15). This one had a few kinks; you must hear me talk alone in the middle, but it was still a great session. In the end, Amrita joined us, which was a pleasant surprise! Thank you to everyone who joined us live. Amantha and Amrita are amazing founders!

This one was special because I got to bring together two amazing founders who are building excess inventory marketplaces in very different spaces. Yonder has invested in both companies, and I am honored to back them.

Excess inventory is a BIG problem. It is estimated at $800B annually, which probably doesn’t capture all of it. The excess inventory space is ripe for B2B marketplaces, and we have already seen traction from companies like Ghost ($30M Series B) and Max Retail ($15M Series A), who raised rounds in 2024. But this isn’t a new model by any stretch of the imagination.

The team shared the chart below, which shows that “off-price” retailers like T.J. Maxx and Ross deliver operating margins of more than 10%, higher than those of their industry peers. This profitable model can be stamped out across many more verticals.

What makes excess inventory an excellent space for marketplaces is a few things:

1. The supply is often unavailable to sell online or offline, and it is also not easily legible for buyers, so making it sellable is a win.

2. The suppliers generally have two choices: throw the inventory away or sell it. This urgency creates downward pricing pressure and urgency.

3. Excessive supply is a constant issue as production forecasting is imperfect, and there are general expiration dates.

4. Many suppliers never had a solution quickly offload inventory at scale and discreetly via blind marketplaces.

A little about each company in this context:

RxPost is a B2B marketplace that allows pharmacists to buy and sell excess inventory from each other. In this instance, the supply wasn’t ever available, so bringing it online for purchase creates the market and allows the sellers to recoup some of their costs. In this case, the sellers are the pharmacies that pre-buy their inventory to sell. If medicine expires, they must throw it away, and no costs are recouped. Selling at a discount allows the seller to recoup costs while providing a discounted wholesale pricing to the buyer, which they can mark up as they resell. RxPost has the unique quality that supply and demand are highly interchangeable and can be both buyers and sellers. 

Sotira is a SaaS-enabled B2B marketplace for excess consumer packaged goods inventory that is shelf stable but has an expiration date on it. Sotira has a unique approach to solving this by providing end-to-end workflow automation software that manages suppliers expiring/surplus inventory, transactions, and logistics. With a system of record for the inventory, companies can efficiently distribute it to Sotira’s marketplace for discrete and rapid offloading to thousands of long-tail surplus buyers. Again, this inventory typically is thrown away if not used, and Sotira allows its sellers to recoup significant costs while creating an arbitrage opportunity for the buyers.

Now, listen to the episode!

About Amantha Bagdon

Amantha Bagdon is a dedicated pharmacy technician and tireless advocate for the profession. As the founder of RxPost, she leads an innovative secondary pharmacy marketplace that helps pharmacies effectively redistribute overstocked medications to reduce waste. She raised venture capital from notable Los Angeles funds, Slauson & Co., and Fabric VC to fuel her mission. Drawing on nearly two decades of firsthand experience and her passion for community and mentorship, she champions the needs of pharmacy professionals in local, state, and national industry groups. Amantha’s unwavering commitment to sustainable solutions sets a new standard for the future of pharmacy.

About Amrita Bhasin

Amrita Bhasin is the co-founder and CEO of Sotira, workflow and compliance automation software for surplus inventory. Sotira is partnered with the biggest instant commerce company in the US, CPG beverage and snack brands, grocery companies, delivery companies, and 3PLs. Amrita was awarded second place at the 2023 AWS Startup Competition and is based in the Bay Area, CA.

Thanks for listening!

As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any questions or feedback. For other great marketplace content, please subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn. If you want to book a call, you can find me on Intro.

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About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a long-time advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he was the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, Justanswer, and the Federal Reserve.

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👋 Welcome to the 5th edition of the Marketplace Memo. My goal is to share curated news, content, and stories I am seeing related to marketplaces with a splash of color from me. Please enjoy and share with others!

🎉 The big callout for the week before we get started is that I have my first paid subscriber group office hours on February 13th at 11am PT / 2pm ET. These office hours are perfect for marketplace founders to come and ask me any and all questions about marketplaces. Paid subscribers will receive an invite to this bi-weekly event. If you are interested in joining please subscribe or feel free to reach out by responding to this email.

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Market Duopoly Vibes

There's a fascinating pattern in marketplace evolution that becomes impossible to unsee once you notice it - markets tend to consolidate around two major players. We see it everywhere: Uber and Lyft in rideshare, Airbnb and VRBO in home-sharing, DoorDash and Uber Eats in food delivery, Amazon and eBay in e-commerce, and Temu and Shein in ultra-fast fashion. I saw this dynamic play out firsthand at Outdoorsy, with our competitor RVshare.

It's reminiscent of how Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently developed theories of evolution at the same time from opposite sides of the globe - when an idea's time has come, it often emerges simultaneously in multiple places. These marketplaces typically evolve into "winner-takes-most" scenarios, where one player eventually captures the majority of the value and/or the diverge significantly in business models.

This pattern keeps repeating itself - this week's fundraising news shows two dietitian marketplace startups each raising $50M rounds. We saw this same pattern just last year when Ghost and Max Retail both raised significant rounds to tackle the excess inventory marketplace opportunity. Ideas and companies come in waves but why is that?

These simultaneous innovations often emerge when multiple underlying technologies or market conditions finally converge to make an idea viable. It's like a lock with multiple tumblers - when they all finally click into place, multiple founders recognize the opportunity at once, racing to build the solution that's suddenly possible. The real question that keeps me up at night isn't why these ideas emerge in pairs, but rather what determines which player ultimately becomes the category leader.

As we've seen time and again in marketplace history, small initial advantages in execution, timing, or strategy can compound dramatically over time, ultimately determining who captures the majority of the market value. And let's be honest - a little bit of luck always plays a role too, whether it's meeting the right investor at the right time or having your competitor stumble at a crucial moment. As we watch these new marketplace duos emerge and battle for dominance, it's worth studying not just who wins, but how and why they win.

The Highlight of the Week

“Spencer Rascoff Joins Match Group as CEO” - This is big news in the marketplace world and quite the marriage. Match Group owns all the big dating marketplaces: Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, and OkCupid to name a few. Spencer Rascoff is a long-time marketplace founder having founded Zillow ($20B marketcap), Hotwire (acquired by IAC/Expedia for ~$665M) and Pacaso (fractional home ownership marketplace). I am excited to see what we he can come in and build. With the return of Whitney Wolfe Herd to Bumble, things could be heating up with dating apps. Below is his note to employees of Match Group and LinkedIn annoucement.

News

"Cracked and Nulled Marketplaces Disrupted in International Cyber Operation” - International law enforcement operation takes down multiple illicit online marketplaces that affected 17M Americans. h/t for sharing. Justice Department

"Apollo Plans to Build the First Marketplace for Private Credit" - The investment firm aims to create a new trading platform for private debt markets. From what I can tell, the primary purpose is to create a liquid market for them to syndicate and trade the debt they originate as well as for investors. The prices of this asset class have typically been opaque, so a marketplace like this could bring a lot of pricing clarity and liquidity. Bloomberg (Paywall)

"Kalshi, an Online Prediction Market, Will Open Its Bets to Brokerages" - Kalshi is a prediction market that allows users to trade on the outcomes of real-world events, such as economic indicators, political outcomes, and weather, using "yes" or "no" event contracts priced based on market-estimated probabilities. Expanding to traditional finance channels is a way of professionalizing the marketplace, a common evolution for peer-to-peer marketplaces. New York Times (Paywall)

"Alibaba Unveils Upgraded AI Model, Claims It Surpasses Rival DeepSeek-V3" - The e-commerce marketplace claims its latest AI model surpasses DeepSeek capabilities. The race is on in AI now, and these foundational models will be less expensive to train and more commodity than initially thought. Wall Street Journal

"CharterUP Hits $1 Billion Platform Volume: How Our Network Powers Group Travel" - This is a massive milestone for any marketplace and is an excellent reminder that you can build big marketplaces in many places. CharterUp

"Serial Entrepreneur Heath Padgett Launches ‘RV Help’" - New marketplace connects RV owners with mobile repair services. Heath previously built and sold a SaaS-enabled market for campgrounds to Camping World. For reference, 11.2 million households in the United States own an RV. RV Business

Fundraising

Sotira raises $2M from Unusual Ventures, Night Capital, K5 Global, Ritual Capital, and others. Sotira SaaS-enabled B2B marketplace that uses AI to help companies offload and monetize their surplus inventory. Disclosure: Yonder is an investor in Sotira TechCrunch

Fay Nutrition raises $50M Series B, led by Goldman Sachs, General Catalyst, and Forerunner. - Fay is a marketplace that connects people with registered dietitians covered by insurance. Fay was valued at $500M in the funding round and, to date, has raised $75M. Fay

Berry Street raises $50M Series B, led by Northzone, Sofina, QuantumLight, and FJ Labs. Berry Street is a marketplace connecting patients and registered dietitians, but it is also described as an AI business-in-a-box. Northzone

Tandem raises $6.1M Seed from Collide Capital, 1984 Venture, and Y Combinator. Tandem is a marketplace that makes it faster for companies to find office space. PR Newswire

Reservoir Raises $14M Series A from Union Square Ventures with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Variant, Archetype, 1kx, and others. - Originally an NFT marketplace and infrastructure, Reservoir is expanding to handle token trading and bridging across chains. The Block

Did I miss one? Email colin@yonder.vc with the subject line “Fundraising Announcement” to be included.

Reads

• "Marketplace report – the AI and e-commerce revolution" - This is a comprehensive analysis of how artificial intelligence reshapes marketplace dynamics and e-commerce operations from the great folks at Prosus, Dealroom.co, and . Prosus

  

• "#05 Theme we Love - B2B Marketplaces in Industrial Recycling" - Post on why industrial recycling is an interesting space to build a marketplace from our friends.

  SNAK Venture Partners Perspectives

  #05 Theme we Love - B2B Marketplaces in Industrial Recycling

  In the first wave of early 2000s consumer marketplaces, the ability to sell online enabled resale marketplace, eBay, to bring a new category of inventory online and thrive. By virtue of being dependent on opportunistic inventory, their “longtail” inventory model didn’t work offline – the physical shelf space required to display the breadth of “one off” …

  Read more

  a year ago · 2 likes · Sonia Nagar

• Slides from Uber’s earnings call - X thread from Uber’s Balaji Krishnamurthy explaining their EV strategy and why the spikes of demand will be a hard problem for EV fleets. If we only want EV ridesharing, the required fleet size will be massive. Twitter/X

  

• "Waymo vs. Uber" - A companion piece to the Uber thread above from noting, among other things, the same demand and supply dynamics.

  The Driverless Digest

  Waymo vs Uber

  How is Uber not totally screwed by Waymo…

  Read more

  a year ago · 16 likes · 4 comments · Harry Campbell

• "DoorDash's Harshit Agarwal Talks Unified Search & Discovery" - Written interview of DoorDash's Harshit Agarwal with about the evolution of search on the platform as quick commerce (delivery of goods from depots instead of stores) grows.

  The Curbivore

  DoorDash's Harshit Agarwal Talks Unified Search & Discovery

  Last call! Friday’s the last day to submit applications to speak, panel, or lead a workshop at Curbivore 2025. We’ve still got a little room left for industry leaders, thoughtful topics and hands-on learning. Submit your idea today…

  Read more

  a year ago · 7 likes · Jonah Bliss

• "Walmart’s marketplace is littered with exclusive items from other retailers like Trader Joe’s." This is an interesting post about the growth of Walmart’s marketplace, which grew 43% in Q3 of last year. It looks like the Wild West for sellers, with third-party sellers listing products from Trader Joe’s, Costco’s Kirkland Brand, and others at a premium. Modern Retail

• Seed to Series A Graduation Rate - Great cohort analysis by Peter Walker of Carta. The big takeaway is that up until 2022, 30-35% of startups raised a Series A after two years. Post 2022, it is ~17% and doesn’t appear to be catching up. Anyone raising a Seed since 2022 must know that the bar for raising a Series A is much higher now and that your Seed money needs to last much longer. LinkedIn

• Years from $1M to $100M ARR - Box CEO Aaron Levie shared this comparison chart of hyperscaling SaaS businesses. AI applications are changing the playbooks, and I am excited to see how this impacts marketplaces. Twitter/X

  

• Sharetribe's Growth Journey - Sharetribe’s CEO, Juho Makkonen, reflects on the marketplace software company's growth challenges and strategic pivots. This was an older post, but Juho has shared follow-up posts to the original post. You can see links to the series of follow-up posts here: 1, 2, 3.

Watch or Listen

• "Unicorn Bakery Conversation: 2025 Trends for B2B and B2C Marketplaces" - Comprehensive discussion on marketplace trends and predictions. Fabrice Grinda

• "What Makes a Great Marketplace with Andrew Blachman" - Industry veteran shares insights on marketplace success factors. Sharetribe

• "Scaling Skillshare as a Leading Online Learning Marketplace" - Discuss education marketplace growth strategies.

Marketplace Jobs

• Software Engineer - Sotira

• Lead Product Manager, Messenger AI - MindBody

• Lead Product Manager - SeatGeek

• Product Manager - Whatnot

• Account Executive - AppSumo

• Director of CRM, Product - Care.com

• Product Manager - Favor

• Senior Software Engineer - Venteur

• Senior Product Marketing Manager - ResQ

• Head of Product Design - Berry Street

• Director of Finance Operations - Batch

• Principal Engineer, Marketing Technology - Airbnb

• Sr. Director, Consumer Insights and Experience Strategy - Hinge

Want to see your job listed here? Email colin@yonder.vc with the subject line “Job Posting” to be included or get your job featured!

Thanks for reading!

That is a wrap for the week! As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any missed feedback or news. Hot tips are always welcome. Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you want to book a call, you can find me on Intro.

Share

🎉 The big callout for the week before we get started is that I have my first paid subscriber group office hours on February 13th at 11am PT / 2pm ET. These office hours are perfect for marketplace founders to come and ask me any and all questions about marketplaces. Paid subscribers will receive an invite to this bi-weekly event. If you are interested in joining please subscribe or feel free to reach out by responding to this email.

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About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a long-time advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he was the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, Justanswer, and the Federal Reserve. 

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I'm excited to launch a new series called The Founder's Toolkit. In it, I'll share detailed examples, guides, and actual templates for different aspects of the fundraising and startup journey. These are all things I wish existed and that people had shared with me!

After helping raise over $200M across multiple companies from Seed to Series D, investing in 35+ companies, LPing multiple funds, raising a venture fund, and advising countless founders on their fundraising journeys, I've seen many fundraising scenarios. I’ve been on all sides of the table and seen what works and what doesn't.

The first post focuses on what every venture-backed founder must master: preparing for fundraising and building your investor pipeline. While this guide primarily applies to founders raising pre-seed through Series A rounds, the principles apply to later stages, too (though those rounds will require a deeper focus on metrics and financials).

Here is everything that is covered in the post (feel free to skip ahead):

• Before You Start: Key Questions to Answer

• Running a Tight Process

• Your Fundraising Launch Checklist

• Building Your Investor Pipeline

• Managing Your Process: The CRM (Free Template Here)

Let’s get this process started!

Before You Start: Key Questions to Answer

Preparation is paramount when it comes to fundraising. Techstars has a great series called The Entrepreneur’s Toolkit, which covers this topic and many others (the name of my series is a nod to this and builds on their great content 🙏). The series describes the preparation process as mise en place, a culinary term for having everything in its place before starting. I love the visual of it. 

I think of fundraising preparation like grocery shopping to build on the culinary theme. Everyone has had that moment when you show up at the grocery store without a list, hungry, and with no meal plan. Starting to fundraise without a plan and starved for cash is no different and will lead to sub-optimal outcomes.

Before diving into investor outreach, you need to answer some fundamental questions:

How much do I want to raise?

Your target raise amount should align with your runway and operational needs, market conditions, stage, and growth plans. Don't just pick a number - model it out. In modeling this out, assume it will take you longer and more money than you think. You don’t want to return to market fundraising months after closing and announcing your round.

What's your timeline?

What date do you need the money by? Working backward from this date is crucial for planning your process and requires a firm understanding of your net burn rate. Remember that fundraising takes longer than expected, and priced rounds take longer to close. For most founders, this means months, not weeks or days.

“Raise off momentum, not runway” - of Euclid Ventures

When possible, you want to raise funds because of your traction, not your immediate cash balance. Raising from a place of strength (by building a great business) leads to superior fundraising outcomes.

What round should I be raising?

This question isn't just about calling it Pre-Seed vs Seed - it's about understanding where your company is in its journey. I often see founders trying to raise a Series A when they probably should be raising a seed extension (which is increasingly common with market valuations resetting lower). Your metrics, traction, and stage of product development should align with market expectations for each round. Know that market expectations are a moving target, and you should not assume the market is the same as the last time you went out to raise. Remember, round names are marketing - focus on the round that matches your company's current state and future milestones.

Who do you want on your cap table?

Not all money is equal. Think strategically about the type of investors who can add value beyond capital. Are you looking for founders, operators, domain experts, angels, funds, or strategic investors? It is essential to know how you want to sculpt your cap table. Do not reach out to every investor possible. Target the right ones.

"Spend more time closing believers than convincing skeptics." - Bruce Hamilton of Mech Ventures

You need to target investors who invest in the type of business you are building. For example, I am a marketplace investor, and almost daily, I get outreach from founders building CPG products, and I say no 100% of the time. It wastes everyone’s time indiscriminately reaching out to investors. Please don’t do it!

What valuation, terms, and dilution are you targeting? 

Be realistic based on current market conditions. In my experience, most companies dilute between 10% and 30% in a given round, with an average closer to 20%. 

Carta data supports my experience. The median Seed dilution is 20.5% and decreases over the later stages. For earlier funding stages, the reverse happens: Lower raise amounts typically lead to lower dilution, but for proper Seed rounds, it approaches 20%.

My basic rule for founders is to divide the amount they want to raise by 20% to imply a post-money valuation. For example, if you're going to raise $2M, this would mean a $10M post-money valuation.

The next thing to determine is whether your company's traction and characteristics will support that valuation. If not, you need to lower the valuation, which increases dilution, or decrease the amount you raise. If yes, you can proceed with it as a baseline or even look to increase valuation, etc., if you can support a higher valuation. The trick is figuring out what the market is willing to value you at, which might be very different from what you think you are worth.

One approach to finding market terms is to talk to founders at the same stage who have just been in market fundraising and try to understand the valuations they were seeing or receiving. VCs can also give you this information, but know it’s in their best interest to guide lower. Also, see what competition raised and try to figure out the terms.

Funding terms are more art than science, and many factors have to be accounted for, like where your company is located, whether you are a repeat or exited founder, whether your company is in a hot sector, etc. For marketplaces, I have covered this in a past post for 2023 that I still think is highly relevant.

What type of round are you raising? 

SAFE? Priced round? Convertible note? The round type has significant implications for your fundraising strategy. With priced rounds, you'll typically need to find a lead investor first who will set the terms and help you build momentum. With SAFEs, you have more flexibility to close investors on a rolling basis, though having a lead or “anchor” is still extremely helpful. SAFEs are increasingly common for earlier-stage rounds where it is inherently more challenging to set valuations and bridge rounds—the topic of round type warrants a dedicated post.

Typically, you wouldn’t want to do more than two SAFEs before doing a priced round. Stacking SAFEs can lead to unexpectedly high dilution for founders and the company. Generally speaking, Seed rounds are where priced rounds become the majority round type, and then the vast majority of rounds after Seed are priced.

Pro tip: If you are about to fundraise, you should have sent investor updates before starting your raise. If you haven't, start now. Nothing builds credibility like showing consistent communication and progress over time.

Running a Tight Process

One of the most common mistakes I see founders make is running an unfocused fundraising process that can last months. While it can work out, it is less than ideal.

“Time kills all deals” - Sales People

If you don’t run a tight process, you can run into the following issues:

1. It kills momentum: Investors lose interest when your process stretches too long. They start wondering why no one else has committed yet and whether they're missing something negative that other investors have spotted.

2. It drains your time: Fundraising is a full-time job that takes your focus away from running the business. The longer it drags on, the more your core business suffers - and ironically, this makes it even harder to raise.

3. Market conditions can shift: Founders have lost investors because they stretched their process into a market downturn. The funding environment can change rapidly, so you want to close while conditions are favorable.

4. You lose negotiating leverage: A drawn-out process suggests a lack of investor interest, which weakens your position in negotiations.

To run a tight process, you need:

1. Clear timeline with deadlines (hypothetical):

   • Week 1-3: Initial meetings

   • Week 4-5: Follow-ups and partner meetings

   • Week 6-7: Term sheet discussions

   • Week 8-10: Closing and paperwork

2. Parallel tracking of investors: Get multiple firms through your pipeline simultaneously so they reach decision points around the same time.

3. Regular communication cadence: Keep all interested parties updated on your process milestones and upcoming deadlines.

4. Consistent messaging: Your story, numbers, and terms should be consistent across all conversations.

Remember, FOMO is your friend, but you can't manufacture it with a scattered process. Investors will see right through false urgency. The key is to create natural competition through tight orchestration of your fundraising timeline.

Pro Tip: Even a tight process must be coupled with realistic expectations and fit what investors see as market valuations and traction. Without that, the best fundraising process will still fail.

Your Fundraising Launch Checklist

“Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Preformance” - The 7P’s from somewhere

Back to grocery shopping, a successful fundraising round requires preparation. You won’t enjoy that delicious meal without the proper ingredients, and you shouldn't start fundraising without having these materials ready:

1. Target Investor List: A well-researched list of investors who invest in your stage and sector with the correct check size.

2. CRM System: Whether you use a spreadsheet or dedicated software, you need a way to track people and interactions. Use the template below!

3. Deck:

   • Teaser deck - This deck should be shorter (10 slides), lighter on sensitive information, and leave the audience wanting more. It should also be easy to skim without a voiceover.

   • Meeting deck - Longer, typically includes an appendix, and is built to be narrated.

   • Tracking - I always recommend that founders use tracking tools like Docsend to see who is looking at the deck, who shared it, who looked at what, and for how long.

4. Forwardable Email Template: Make it easy for your champions to make introductions. Examples to come in another post.

5. Incorporation as a C-Corp: Most venture-backed startups are incorporated as Deleware C-corps, and investors look for this. However, this is changing, and more companies are incorporating in Nevada or Texas.

6. Financial Model: Show you understand your P&L, unit economics, and growth drivers. Typically, this would be up to a 3-year forecast/plan with an easy-to-see use of funds.

7. Cap Table: Clean and up-to-date record of all your investors and shareholders.

8. Data Room: Organized repository of key documents for due diligence, including many of the above. Examples to come in another post.

9. Optional:

   1. Investment Memo - The memo should concisely outline your business, traction, and opportunity in your own words. Some investors love memos, some love decks and others love videos. I think you provide all of them, so you cover your bases.

   2. Intro Video - Typically, founders record a Loom video walking prospective investors through their deck and introducing themselves and the company.

This post will focus on 1 and 2 and explain how to do them using a spreadsheet or CRM software.

Building Your Investor Pipeline

“Ask for money, get advice. Ask for advice, get money twice” - Pitbull

Your investor pipeline is more than just a list—it's a strategic tool you use repeatedly. You can also add to it between raises so you don’t start over again at each round. What is always true in fundraising is that relationships matter. The earlier you can build and cultivate relationships with future investors, the better. 

Building rapport before you raise allows investors to get to know you and move faster when you raise a round. You want to avoid a cold start here, but you don’t need to map this out years in advance. Cultivate those relationships and track them!

Build an Effective Pipeline

1. Research Phase - Find relevant investors.

   • Use tools like Crunchbase, PitchBook, and LinkedIn.

   • Ask for recommendations from existing investors, advisors, and friendly founders.

   • Look at who invested in similar companies.

   • Tap into your network!

   • Check portfolio fit and potential conflicts.

   • Get creative!

2. Prioritization - Pick the right investors.

   • Tier your investors (1, 2, 3)

   • Consider the timing of their last fund

   • Identify relevant partners within each firm

3. Path to Intro - Get access to investors.

   1. Map out who can introduce you to each investor.

   2. Quality of intro matters - find strong connections with the following hierarchy:

      1. Founders

      2. Investors (existing)

      3. Network

      4. Investors (not invested)

      5. Cold Outreach

Maximizing Introductions

“Your Network is Your Net Worth” - Porter Gale

As you progress in your introductions, you will find that certain people you meet, such as existing investors or advisors, are nodes that can open up large networks. Finding these super nodes is critical to building your pipeline. I often find that these super nodes are angel investors, advisors, or emerging managers who are very active in the startup ecosystem in some capacity.

Brian Nichols of Hustle Fund’s Angel Squad was the first to introduce me to the importance of angel investors to early-stage founders who are fundraising.

“The people who write the $1k, $2k check are the most helpful at supporting the founder[s]” - Brian Nichols

I previously wrote about this phenomenon, and I think the following excerpt sums it up nicely:

“Taking smaller checks from angel investors often leads to introductions to other investors, resulting in a multiplicative effect, or the "money multiplier." These angel investors often work in the tech industry and are keen to help startups grow. Steven Fitzsimmons of Freshpaint perfectly visualizes this point.”

The success of your pipeline depends on finding the correct targets and getting access to them. Relationships are everything in fundraising; invest in them early and often and keep nurturing them.

Pro Tip: When tiering your investors and starting to pitch, it is essential to practice on “friendlies” and lower-tier investors first. You want to sharpen the knife before shooting your shot with your tier 1 investors.

Managing Your Process: The CRM

You must manage your process once you have your pipeline set and your introductions flowing. Everyone has a different way of doing this, but time and time again, I see that founders who are successful with fundraising use a CRM. The type of CRM is less important than just doing it. So, let’s get into how to do it.

Option 1: The Google Sheets Approach

The most common way to do this is to use a Google Sheet because it is free and easily shareable. I have also seen founders successfully use Notion and Airtable. To help founders shortcut this, I have shared a free battle-tested Google Sheet template that I have used with many founders to raise tens of millions in venture capital (hopefully hundreds of millions soon!). 

Get the Template

The template has instructions provided on the “Start Here” tab. The template is view-only, so please create your copy and customize it!

Pro Tip: If you use a Google Sheet, your investor pipeline will be shareable with your network. Leverage this by sharing it with your existing investors, advisors, friends, and friendly founders and asking who they can introduce you to on your list. You can also ask people who might be missing from the list.

Option 2: Using a CRM Software

CRM software is the most sophisticated approach; it has a lot of benefits and an initial ramp-up time. The nice part about investing in software for your investor pipeline/CRM is that you can build, customize, and use it for multiple rounds. I would recommend this approach for founders who have used CRMs in the past and won’t spend just as much time setting it up as they do using it. The downside is that you must pay for them, although most have a free tier.

Below is a list of common CRM software that founders use. I have obtained discount codes from the companies where possible!

Top 5 CRMs for Startup Fundraising

1. Folk (20% off with FOLKX20)

2. Attio (10% off with this link)

3. Foundersuite

4. Hubspot

5. Pipedrive

If there are others that I have missed, please share them in the comments.

I use Folk for all my fundraising for Yonder and can share a bit about how I set it up and what features I use.

I tested out a bunch of CRMs, and ultimately, I just wanted something simple that integrated with Gmail and LinkedIn. Folk was a fit, with Attio as a close second. The features I use daily are below:

1. Chrome Extension (I can’t live without this now)

   • Auto-capture LinkedIn profiles

   • Track email interactions

   • Quick note-taking

2. Pipeline Management

   • Custom fields for round tracking

   • Automated follow-up reminders

3. Email Integration

   • Outreach template management

   • Emails to lists of investors for outreach and updates

   • Open and response tracking

The other nice part about Folk is that they already have pre-built templates for fundraising and emails, which you can find here. Lots of the other CRMs are free to start and have the same features and templates, but I found the free tier to be generous on Folk, and the cost was ultimately low (~$200/year).

Choosing Your System

Using a spreadsheet or CRM software depends on your CRM experience, fundraising scale, and team size. I've seen founders successfully close rounds using both. A well-organized spreadsheet might be all you need to run a focused Seed process with 40-50 target investors. However, a CRM's automation and collaboration features can save you significant time if you're talking to 100+ investors or have multiple team members involved in the fundraising process.

The key isn't which tool you use - it's how consistently you use it. Choose a system you'll maintain and stick to. I've seen founders with fancy CRM setups fail because they didn't log their interactions, and others close major rounds using nothing but a simple Google Sheet they updated religiously. Your CRM should help you stay organized and focused, not become another task you must manage.

What's Next?

Now, start your fundraising process!

Remember that running an effective fundraising process is an art, a science, and a means to an end. The goal isn't just to raise money—it's to find the right partners to help you build a successful, self-sustaining business. 

In the upcoming posts in our Founder's Toolkit series, we'll explore compelling pitch decks, forwardable emails, data rooms, investor updates, and more. Be sure to subscribe to get them!

Let me know in the comments what specific aspects of fundraising you'd like me to cover in future posts. If you find this helpful, consider sharing it with other founders who might benefit from it. 🙏

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Thanks for reading!

As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any comments and feedback. If you need help setting up a fundraising process, I work with a few companies every month, typically on a referral basis. Please reach out to see my availability.

Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you want to book a call, you can find me on Intro. If you like this content, please consider supporting me by becoming a paid subscriber!

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About Me:

Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a long-time advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he was the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, Justanswer, and the Federal Reserve.