Whatnot has opened its new European headquarters in Dublin, with plans to double its Irish workforce over the next 18 months and open its platform to Irish small businesses in 2027. The Los Angeles-based live commerce platform employs more than 130 people in Ireland and is hiring across engineering and AI, operations, strategy, and trust and safety.

Individuals and small businesses sell on Whatnot through live video, showing products, answering questions and taking orders in real time. Hundreds of thousands of sellers generated more than $8 billion (€6.8 billion) in sales in the first half of 2026, exceeding the platform’s total for all of 2025.

The structural driver is rapid growth in live sales, which depends on the core platform staying reliable and secure. Whatnot’s Dublin engineers work on buying and selling flows, payments and the underlying infrastructure, and new AI engineering roles will build tools that take admin work off sellers, from listing products to post-show tasks.

“The depth of engineering and AI talent coming out of Ireland’s universities is a big part of why we keep growing the team here,” said Grant LaFontaine, co-founder and CEO of Whatnot. “Sellers around the world rely on what our Dublin engineers build every day to grow their businesses, and there’s a lot more to build.”

The audience for Irish sellers is already on the platform. The number of people in Ireland shopping on Whatnot each month has grown almost fivefold over the past two years, with most orders filled by sellers in the UK, Germany and the US.

International buyers are also seeking out Irish goods, with purchases of items such as collectible crystal and sporting memorabilia more than tripling over the past year. Because Irish businesses cannot yet sell on the platform, all of those items currently come from sellers based outside Ireland.

Whatnot was founded in 2019, is headquartered in Los Angeles and has placed its new Dublin office on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay in Silicon Docks. It raised a $545 million (approximately €458 million) Series G in August 2026 at a valuation of around $20 billion (approximately €16.8 billion).

For the sector, the expansion reflects live commerce platforms building European engineering and trust capability in Dublin as seller communities grow.

Source: IDA Ireland / StockAnalysis