The future of commerce is not some complex algorithm; it’s essentially the same as it has been since the 1980s.

That’s the gambit of a hugely successful new company putting up numbers that rival tech’s biggest.

Its latest valuation is a monstrous $20 billion, which is already a huge leap from its October 2025 numbers. The company has nearly doubled its valuation in those 10 months, up from $11.5 billion which secured an investment of $225 million.

That $11.5 billion valuation came less than a year after the company raised $265 million in January 2025 off of a $4.97 billion valuation.

This all means that the commerce app has quadrupled its value in about 18 months, something very rarely seen in its sector.

And that has the industry buzzing.

‘We only exist to the extent that we provide our customers a lot of value.’

Meet Whatnot. It’s based on an incredibly simple idea. Picture a cable channel with a 1-800 number, but it’s a livestream on your smartphone or computer.

That simple difference is what sets the livestream auction app apart from that staple of late-20th-century television, the home shopping channel. The buy-from-home TV programs exploded into popularity with the introduction of the Home Shopping Network back in 1982.

Whatnot has sellers present their items just as they did on TV back in the day, urging viewers of the livestream to buy before the time runs out.

As the Next Web puts it: “The urgency of a live sale, the countdown, the banter, the scarcity, does work that a static product page never could.”

RELATED: Dumpster-diving women claim they make $5,000 per month off discarded Louis Vuitton wallets and Michael Kors bags

Whatnot co-founder and CEO Grant LaFontaine. Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Fast Company

The Next Web reported that the company handled about $8 billion worth of livestream sales over the past year in North America and Europe alone, which helps justify its massive valuation to backers, markets, and industry insiders.

Looking at the backers, perhaps it should have been obvious Whatnot would enjoy a big upward trend: Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Google’s CapitalG are all involved.

Those investment firms are strongly associated with the venture capital scene, and indeed the only other companies making the same kinds of leaps in valuation as Whatnot are in the tech space. Companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, Nvidia, Tesla, and ByteDance are some of the comparable valuations in recent history, some of which far exceed a 4x jump.

The spike is largely driven by Whatnot’s rampant consumer base, which logs an insane amount of time on the app.

RELATED: BRONCO BUSTED: I caught Ford sneaking my data — and uncovered an even bigger threat

Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for ReedPop

Co-founder and CEO Grant LaFontaine wrote in 2024 that buyers spent more than 80 minutes per day on the app that year.

Grant previously worked in product roles at YouTube and Facebook and co-founded Kit, a merchandising company that was acquired by Patreon in 2024.

LaFontaine said in May that success comes down to being willing to put in hard work while also being willing to be wrong.

“We only exist to the extent that we provide our customers a lot of value,” he told Fast Company.

“If you want to build a customer-centered culture,” the CEO added, “you have to actually follow through on building one and inject it everywhere you possibly can in the organization.”

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​App, Whatnot, Valuation, Shopping, Big tech 

A child sex sting operation in a Minnesota suburb of Minneapolis led to the arrest of two dozen men who allegedly sought to pay for sex with children.

Even more alarmingly, the Blaine Police Department said Friday in a Facebook post that nearly 400 people responded to the online advertisement they had set up in the operation.

‘These operations are a critical tool used by law enforcement agencies nationwide to stop crimes against children.’

Police said the two-day operation was intended to protect minors from “exploitation” and targeted those seeking to “engage in illegal activity involving underage youth.”

The 24 arrested allegedly “offered to pay for illegal sexual conduct with a person they believed to be a juvenile.”

They were booked into the Anoka County Jail on suspicion of prostitution.

Police said at least one person arrested was already a registered sex offender and others were repeat offenders.

“Everyone arrested will appear in court, where release conditions will be determined,” police said.

A total of 368 people responded to the advertisement in the online sting.

“These operations are a critical tool used by law enforcement agencies nationwide to stop crimes against children and deter violent or harmful behavior directed at youth,” police said.

RELATED: Middle school assistant principal allegedly tried to pay for sex with 13-year-old — but it was a sting operation

Blaine Police were aided in the operation by nine law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

Blaine is a city of about 70,000 residents.

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​Minneapolis, Child sex sting operation, Online predators, Crime 

Climate change policy might be due for a change itself.

Seventeen state financial officers have signed on to a letter urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to scrap Biden-era climate-related disclosure rules. The rules would require publicly traded companies to undertake costly environmental reviews to report their greenhouse gas emissions and other climate change metrics.

‘Americans want the SEC focused on protecting markets and investors, not turning our capital markets into a vehicle for climate activism.’

Responsible for managing billions of public dollars, the signatories argue that climate disclosure standards are an “unlawful expansion of the administrative state” poised to hamper private sector economic growth. Those standards are also referred to as the “Final Rules.”

“As stewards of public pension and treasury assets, we are acutely sensitive to costs borne by the companies in which public funds invest — costs ultimately passed to shareholders, including the beneficiaries we serve,” the signatories wrote. “The Commission’s own economic analysis estimates that rescinding the Final Rules could generate annualized savings of approximately $4.9 billion, and a total cost savings on the order of $7.9 billion.”

The SEC adopted the climate disclosure rules in March 2024. Opponents launched numerous legal challenges which were consolidated in the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. The agency itself stayed the rules in April 2024 awaiting legal resolution, but President Donald Trump’s election resulted in the stay becoming permanent. The SEC under Acting Chairman Mark Uyeda declined to defend the rule in March 2025.

Though never enforced, the rules remain on the books.

RELATED: Texas slams breaks on data center projects as Abbott orders sweeping industry audit

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The rules wouldn’t just be expensive to implement. They might also be illegal to enforce.

“The Trump SEC is right to rescind the climate disclosure rule and refocus the agency on its fundamental responsibility of protecting investors and maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets,” Utah Treasurer Marlo Oaks told Blaze News. “For years, the ESG movement sought to use the SEC to advance a climate agenda through disclosure mandates that went beyond material financial information and imposed unnecessary costs on businesses and investors. Rescinding this rule returns the SEC to its proper role as a neutral financial regulator focused on protecting investors and facilitating markets.”

Environmental, social, and governance standards are investment criteria used to assess a private company’s adherence to climate mandates and emissions regulations.

The SEC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If successful, the rescission would be the latest in a long string of regulatory rollbacks during Trump’s second term. The Environmental Protection Agency under Lee Zeldin nixed the Obama-era endangerment finding in February.

As the law of the land since 2009, the ruling categorized carbon emissions as pollutants under the Clean Air Act and subjected them to federal regulation.

“The financial officers are right to support the Trump Administration’s efforts to rescind the Biden-era climate disclosure rules,” American Energy Institute CEO Jason Isaac told Blaze News. “Washington bureaucrats shouldn’t be weaponizing financial regulations to pressure companies into advancing far-left ESG policies that Congress never approved.”

“Americans want the SEC focused on protecting markets and investors, not turning our capital markets into a vehicle for climate activism,” Isaac added.

The letter was submitted ahead of the August 3 comment deadline regarding the rule’s potential rescission.

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​Donald trump, Environmental protection agency, Joe biden, Lee zeldin, Securities and exchange commission, Politics 

Fauci thought we would forget; now he’s desperately trying to rewrite history.

The infectious disease “expert” has shifted his story on gain-of-function research and the lab leak theory — but longtime Democrat Bill Maher isn’t letting him off the hook.

“He was caught in actual lies,” Maher said. “He was telling people — and the big issue to me is the origin of this, which is very important. How did it start? And he was telling people up front when it first began, ‘It was from the wet markets. That’s a conspiracy theory if you say it escaped from the lab.’”

Maher pointed out that the release of Fauci’s diary by Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has proven that he “knew better,” and he blames not only Fauci but the extremely partisan split on how to handle the pandemic.

“If we weren’t so partisan, we could just say gain-of-function research,” he said. “Obama told him not to do it. I would always have said don’t do it. But it’s a viable debate. It’s a reasonable debate. Should we soup up something that’s bad, this bacteria, to study it?”

“We could have had that debate in a rational way,” he continued. “We didn’t want to do that because why? Because we make everything about race.”

Maher recalled that during the pandemic, no one was allowed to say it “escaped from the lab because that was the racist point of view” and would mean “the entire Asian continent would have been somehow complicit in this because it escaped.”

“It was ridiculous, but that is where they went,” he added.

“Welcome to reality. Seriously, welcome to some common sense,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray comments on “Pat Gray Unleashed.”

“He’s starting to see the Democrat Party for what it is,” he adds.

Want more from Pat Gray?

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​Anthony fauci, Bill maher, Conspiracy theory, Democrat party, Lab leak theory, Pandemic, Race, Wet markets, Pat gray, Rand paul, Blazetv show