Marketplace Memo #13
Kalanick Robotaxi Reboot, Shopify Opens Up to OpenAI, Bumble CEO lays off 30%, Mercor Gets Offers up to $10B, Clutch Reaches $1B Car Sales, Kalshi Raises $185M, Polymarket Raises $200M and Much More!
Hi, it’s Colin! Welcome to the 127 new subscribers who have joined Take Rate since the last Marketplace Memo. I am excited to have you join the 3,710+ marketplace founders, operators, and investors who subscribe. Join the fun! 👇
👋 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!
This post could have been vibe-coded with…
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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
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.
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.
Like the concept of market-making vs market-taking. The Mercor example was spot on, and the Cloudflare news is definitely a game changer. Excited to see how this evolves!