Influencer Marketer LTK Raises $300 Million
Influencer marketing platform LTK has raised $300 million at a $2 billion valuation.
LTK, formerly known as RewardStyle and Liketoknow.it, raised the capital from SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
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LTK operates an influencer marketing platform that links content creators, brands and shoppers. Last year the business saw more than $3 billion in sales run through its ecosystem, with consumers purchasing fashion, beauty, fitness, home and lifestyle products recommended by its influencer community, the company said.
The business will use the capital to continue to scale, including to build up more global operations. LTK is planning to “aggressively hire” across the company in order to build out services for brands, creators and consumers, according to a statement.
“We believe there is a paradigm shift in the way consumers shop, which has highlighted the tremendous role creators play in guiding the online retail experience,” said Lydia Jett, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. “LTK has built a seamless shopping platform that now reaches millions of monthly shoppers in more than 100 countries.”
Earlier this year, RewardStyle rebranded to LTK, the acronym for shopping app Liketoknow.it. Already the company had been hiring across its product and engineering teams, which are tasked with building out the vision that founder Amber Venz Box has called “Shopify for creators.”
“Part of what we think that future looks like is for creators to have and own their own world-class shop. As part of this hiring, we’re building out a vision for essentially being the Shopify for creators — building a world-class e-commerce platform that allows [creators] to bring customers into their store for the customers to discover, gain confidence in the purchase, find out everything they need to know and ultimately, transact there,” Venz Box told WWD in June.
Creators will not “have to hold any sort of inventory, they will ship no boxes,” Venz Box said. “They will be able to host an e-commerce experience where they own their customer [and] traffic and are still in partnership with brands available on LTK.”
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