Shopify Ventures

2025, let’s go. We are doubling down on the future of commerce and supporting bold, technical teams that are helping merchants, developers, and entrepreneurs build at the cutting edge. Our aim? Use capital and our expertise to support founders focused on key themes that we deeply care about: • Empower developers to build better and faster with next-gen tooling and infrastructure. • Provide entrepreneurs with more automation across their entire business stack  to unlock potential to get to scale faster. • Power future iterations of commerce by enabling merchants to reach customers of all types and sizes around the world. Our ambition continues to grow, but our founder-focused approach remains the same. We invest post product and work as partners, providing strategic guidance and deep operator expertise through our Advisory Program. Learn more: www.shopify.vc

Proxy is now available for everyone. Convergence’s language-to-agent technology helps make an endless list of tasks easier for users and can repeat customized workflows. Check it out: www.convergence.ai

We’re excited to continue supporting Reown (prev. WalletConnect Inc.) with a follow-on investment in their Series B, led by 1kx and Union Square Ventures. Renown’s mission is to enable onchain UX through best-in-class tooling, empowering app and wallet developers to unlock Web3's full potential. We have been impressed with their development on AppKit, multichain expansion, along with incredibly strong network adoption growth. We’re proud to be supporting founders who are creating technology that helps developers build faster in a Web3 future. Congrats Jess Houlgrave and Pedro Gomes—excited to see what you ship next.

As the year draws to a close, we hope everyone takes the time to reflect on the incredible milestones we've achieved together across all our communities. To all forward-thinking founders, developers, and investors, thank you for pushing the boundaries of the tech industry. Take this season to unplug, recharge, and let your creativity simmer. Here’s to a new year filled with exciting ideas and ventures.

We’ve launched a series of Founder Dinners as a part of our ongoing commitment to champion a strong community of entrepreneurs building the future of AI, data infrastructure, app and web development. Open source is a big part of this. This week, we had the pleasure to host an inspiring group of open source founders, featuring the legendary Bob Young, Co-Founder of Red Hat. Partnering with OSS Capital, we dove into Bob’s fascinating journey of building Red Hat into the first billion-dollar open-source company. We left the evening armed with invaluable insights—from discussing the evolving strategies to commercialize and scale open-source businesses, to the importance of transparency in licensing, to even marital advice. Here’s a peek at some of our takeaways: 1️⃣ Open source software is much more than just a better development model; it's a superior marketing strategy. Unlike proprietary software, open source attracts users and potential customers at a fraction of the cost. 2️⃣ Running an OS startup can be compared to Geoffrey Rush’s Shakespeare in Love character, who said theatres face “insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster," and yet, things mysteriously work out in the end. 3️⃣ Open-source models operate like a barter system rather than pure altruism. Founders should focus on practical incentives benefiting developers, businesses, and communities. 4️⃣ Align your open source licenses (e.g., GPL, MIT) with providing transparency and consumer trust rather than strictly adhering to a particular model. 5️⃣ Help your customers ask for more value, not a lower price. It is important to sell the benefit your product delivers (e.g. developer happiness, trust, convenience, cost efficient, interoperability etc.), not the product. Special thanks to you to the incredible founders who joined us: Cube Dioxus Labs Draw Things Dylibso Flox HumanSignal InfinyOn Liquid AI MotherDuck Readyset Tobiko Upstash It’s the power of this community that will turn the ideas around the future of open source into reality.

We are always telling our portfolio companies that the hallmark of a great business is one that is constantly shipping product. We’re big believers in practicing what we preach, and that's why we’re thrilled to release the Winter ’25 Edition. Every six months, we show the world all of the products that we have been working on. In this Edition, we’ve honed in on those small details that make a big impact—like speeding up workflows, expanding GraphQL APIs, rolling out new components into checkout, and more. We’re giving devs more tools and surfaces to build on. Dive into The Boring Edition to explore these updates and see how we’re making it easier to innovate in commerce and beyond.

Congratulations to portfolio company Loop for their strategic acquisition of Wonderment.

When commerce meets code, magic happens. This BFCM, we celebrated our merchants worldwide by putting the power of entrepreneurship on full display, lighting up the Las Vegas Sphere. Our systems were orchestrating a symphony at unprecedented scale… Technical milestones: 1️⃣ 57.3 PB of data processed and served from our infrastructure 2️⃣ 10.5 trillion total database queries 3️⃣ Averaged 170 million requests per minute at Shopify’s edge, with bursts over 280 million requests per minute Real-world impact: 1️⃣ 16,500+ entrepreneurs made their first sale 2️⃣ 67,000+ merchants had their highest-selling day ever 3️⃣ $11.5B global sales on Shopify, up 24% on last year This isn't just about numbers – it's about building technology that makes the impossible possible. Congratulations to our entrepreneurs, portfolio companies, and partners on an outstanding weekend of achievement.

We’re thrilled to announce a follow-on investment in Melio’s latest fundraise. This $150M round was led by Fiserv, with participation from Accel, Bessemer Venture Partners, Capital One, Coatue and General Catalyst, among others. Melio is our trusted partner for Shopify Bill Pay. This round marks a significant milestone in their mission to revolutionize B2B payments. With our initial investment thesis coming to life, Shopify has integrated Melio’s accounts payable solution, enabling merchants to manage and pay bills directly from their Shopify admin. Melio’s continued success is also a testament to the power of our collaboration and shared mission to simplify financial operations for businesses everywhere. We’re thrilled to build upon our existing relationship and support Matan Bar and Ilan Atias on their journey ahead! 

Our Shopify Ventures portfolio companies recently benefited from an insightful AMA session with John Michael Hogan, Product Lead for Shopify's App Ecosystem. The discussion focused on strategies to enhance effectiveness within our App Store. Here are some takeaways: 1️⃣ Keyword planning: Tailor your keywords specifically for the Shopify App Store, where merchants use more precise, function-oriented terms like “abandoned cart recovery” or “upsell” compared to the broader keywords often searched on Google, such as “top rated Shopify apps to solve abandoned carts” or “Best Shopify upsell apps 2024.” https://lnkd.in/grdbwhKb 2️⃣ Reviews: Focus on 1:1 customer interactions to obtain meaningful, unbiased feedback. Keep in mind that positive reviews play a significant part in improving your app’s visibility on the Shopify App Store. https://lnkd.in/ghv_hFgF 3️⃣ Ads: Consider leveraging ads on the Shopify App Store to boost discovery since more installs will help with your organic search ranking. You can also use ad performance insights to refine your organic SEO and keyword strategies. https://lnkd.in/gSUUVKN A big thank you to our Ventures Advisors for sharing their insights in sessions designed for our portfolio companies. These advisors are hand-picked based on their expertise in engineering, product, marketing, sales, and talent. We are excited to distill and share key insights from our upcoming sessions with the broader ecosystem.