Shopify Ventures

We’re excited to announce our investment in Crstl’s Series A, backing Dipti Desai and Suparna Gharpure in revolutionizing B2B commerce. Crstl empowers digital-first businesses to integrate, automate, and scale critical operational systems with ease. Its AI-enabled, modern EDI solution opens up new distribution channels, enhances efficiency, reduces costs, and ensures seamless compliance in B2B transactions for brands, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers and 3PLs. Shopify Ventures’ mission is backing companies that help entrepreneurs thrive in dynamic markets. We are thrilled to see how Crstl’s platform transforms the B2B industry, while raising the bar for ease of use and operational excellence.

We’re thrilled to announce our investment into Graphite’s $52M Series B, supporting founders Merrill Lutsky, Greg Foster, and Tomas Reimers as they transform high-performance engineering teams worldwide. Why did we invest? As generative AI evolves coding behaviors, we’ve been seeking tools that help dev teams ship 10x faster in collaborative environments, without sacrificing quality. Git stacking is on every developer’s radar, but effective stacking requires extensive rebasing—a painful and time-consuming task. Enter Graphite. Graphite’s toolset extends beyond stacked diffs, offering an end-to-end AI-powered platform including an intuitive review inbox, smart pull requests, and stack-aware merge queues. Their AI code review agent generates and posts comments on code changes, which can be customized to align with coding standards and preferences so that reviews are more relevant and actionable. Graphite offers all of this while integrating seamlessly with existing Git workflows, so all the tools that developers are used to using, just work. Having collaborated closely with their team, it’s been fantastic to witness their growth into an enterprise-ready platform that can support thousand-person engineering orgs. Their mission-focused team, excellent product sense, and swift feature rollouts are empowering companies of all sizes to ship faster and smarter. As the world of web development changes at break-neck speed, Shopify Ventures is excited to help engineers build faster by deepening our investment commitment in the dev tooling space. We can’t wait to see what’s next for Graphite.

We're proud to welcome Andrea You to our team and revolutionize entrepreneurship together.

Our Shopify Ventures portfolio companies recently benefited from diving deep into product marketing with our Advisor Deana Thornton, Product Marketing Director at Shopify. The discussion focused on strategies to optimize product marketing efforts, including GTM strategy, and practical cross-functional collaboration. Here are some key takeaways: • 𝗣𝗶𝗻𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲: Choose between acquiring new customers or enhancing product adoption among existing users. This focus will guide your marketing strategy and help segment your efforts effectively. • 𝗥𝗲𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲: Distill your strategy into distinct customer segments and archetypes. Build detailed user personas to align your messaging with their needs, behaviors, and decision-making processes for better engagement. • 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿-𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗰 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀: Strong communities help users feel connected to your brand. Harness them to engage with customers and prioritize their user experience in product development. Shopify does this with its Partner & Developer Community forum⎯an actively managed space for discussion and support. • 𝗙𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗽𝘀: Implement regular product reviews between product and product marketing teams, like Shopify’s six-week cycle, to help PMM teams refine their go-to-market plans and adjust future tactics based on past results. • 𝗟𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗣𝗠𝘀: Engage product managers to host live webinars/AMAs for major releases, but also in written formats (via community forums) to engage audiences effectively and address long-tail questions. This also helps you gather insights, create FAQ content, and build community. A big thank you to Deana and our Venture Advisors for their invaluable expertise in tailored sessions with our portfolio companies. Stay tuned—we'll be sharing more key insights from upcoming sessions with the broader ecosystem soon.

I’ve joined Shopify to invest in and empower world class entrepreneurs at Shopify Ventures ✨ 💚 As the daughter of a small business entrepreneur, I love what Shopify stands for — to create more entrepreneurs in the world and build the best products to help make them successful. This level of founder empathy and commitment is the same philosophy we are bringing to investing: founders first, and always there for the highs and the lows. 🚀 Shopify is the entrepreneurship company. We invest in cutting-edge tools and infrastructure that help entrepreneurs start, scale, and succeed — whether you’re a merchant, developer, or founder of any business large or small. Excited to work with Jonathan Chen Tian Tian Feng Udhay Gill Edson Lai, CPA Andrea You Ivana Pupovac, CPA, CA Julia Skopek (Chelaru) Giovanna Robledo Kir Shatrov for this next chapter as we support the next generation of great entrepreneurs. And a big thank you to all my colleagues at Sapphire Ventures for everything over the past 6+ years.

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.