How He Built a ‘Stock Market of Things’ Startup to a $3.8 Billion Valuation and ‘Revenue From Day One’
Chris Kaufman helped lead marketplace startup StockX to over 30 million users. Over time, nine-figure annual revenue became “the norm,” he said.
Key Takeaways
- Chris Kaufman co-founded StockX, a global marketplace for products like sneakers, streetwear, collectibles and electronics, in 2015.
- Nine-figure annual revenue has now become “the norm” for the company, he says.
- Here’s how Kaufman built StockX to achieve a $3.8 billion valuation.
Chris Kaufman co-founded global marketplace company StockX in 2015, serving as its chief creative officer and playing a key role in the startup’s growth to over 30 million users and a $3.8 billion valuation. He has since stepped back from the company and has dedicated his career to supporting women- and minority-owned startups, advising and investing in over a dozen early-stage businesses. Kaufman is also the author of the book Empathy at Work. Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
Tell me a little more about your business.
StockX is a global marketplace for “current culture” — sneakers, streetwear, collectibles, trading cards, electronics and more, built to function like a stock market rather than a traditional ecommerce site. Buyers place bids, sellers place asks, and when they match, a trade clears at a transparent market price. Every item that doesn’t ship directly from a trusted seller flows through our verification centers, where it’s carefully inspected and verified before going to the buyer, which is a big part of the trust equation.
When did you start your startup?
We founded StockX in early 2015 and launched the live marketplace in February 2016 in downtown Detroit.
Where did you find inspiration for it?
The inspiration was twofold. First, Josh Luber’s work on Campless, a data site that tracked resale prices for rare sneakers, showed there was already a real, quantifiable market for these products; it just lacked transparency, structure and trust. Second, Josh, Dan Gilbert, Greg Schwartz and I were all drawn to the idea of a true “stock market of things”: Take mechanisms that have worked for centuries in financial markets like anonymous bid/ask, real-time pricing and historical data, and apply them to high-demand consumer goods.
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How much money/investment did it take to launch?
StockX didn’t start as a bootstrapped garage project; it was born inside Dan Gilbert’s broader Detroit tech ecosystem, so the earliest phases combined his capital, the acquisition of Campless and shared resources across his portfolio. That makes it hard to put a single “launch number” on the very beginning, and we’ve never broken out an exact dollar figure for day-one capital. Publicly, the first round we disclosed was a $6 million financing in early 2017, about a year after launch, led by high-profile investors backing the “stock market of things” concept.
Over time, we went on to raise hundreds of millions of dollars across multiple rounds, including a $275 million Series E in 2020 and an additional $60 million primary round in 2021, bringing total funding to roughly $700 million and valuing the company at $3.8 billion.
How long did it take you to see consistent monthly revenue? How much did the business earn?
Because we’re a transaction-fee marketplace, we were generating revenue from day one. Every trade produced fees, but it took about a year after launch for the business to feel like a real machine with repeatable, predictable monthly behavior instead of a series of spikes around big releases and press moments.
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As volume grew and we broadened the catalog beyond sneakers, the revenue line started to smooth out and scale with it. By 2017, we expected to surpass $100 million in gross merchandise volume (GMV) for the year, which already implied meaningful fee revenue for a young platform. By mid-2019, we were doing more than $100 million in gross product sales each month, and external estimates pegged that at roughly $15 million in monthly revenue, or about a $180 million annual run rate. The last specific revenue figure we’ve shared publicly is for 2020, when StockX reported $1.8 billion in GMV, more than 7.5 million trades and over $400 million in GAAP revenue for the year.
We don’t break out more granular, month-by-month numbers than that, but the arc is clear from our side: very early revenue from launch, followed by a few years of fast compounding until nine-figure annual revenue became the norm.
What does growth and revenue look like now?
Today, StockX is still private, and we don’t publish current revenue, so I can only point to what’s on record and the directional indicators. Our reports show that by 2023, we had surpassed 50 million lifetime trades, 15 million lifetime buyers and 1.7 million lifetime sellers
By early 2025, that had grown past 60 million trades and 20 million buyers worldwide, with tens of millions of monthly visitors to the platform. In our major financing updates, we reported more than $3 billion in lifetime GMV by late 2020. Since then, the user base, categories and international footprint have all expanded materially.
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On top of marketplace growth, the business has also leaned into brand protection and trust. For example, a recent report noted that we rejected more than 370,000 counterfeit items worth about $74 million in a single year.
What is your best piece of specific, actionable business advice?
At StockX, the reason we could build a marketplace that now serves tens of millions of buyers and sellers wasn’t just a clever “stock market of things” pitch, it was the fact that we stayed obsessively close to the user (both sneakerheads and casual buyers), used real data to challenge our own assumptions and built what I describe as an “empathy system” inside the company — a culture where people were expected to listen, surface hard truths and challenge ideas, not each other.
In practice, that means: Talk to customers every week, ship something small every week and make it safe inside your company to surface bad news early. If you can institutionalize those three habits, your odds of finding real product–market fit and surviving the inevitable pivots and shocks go up dramatically.
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Key Takeaways
- Chris Kaufman co-founded StockX, a global marketplace for products like sneakers, streetwear, collectibles and electronics, in 2015.
- Nine-figure annual revenue has now become “the norm” for the company, he says.
- Here’s how Kaufman built StockX to achieve a $3.8 billion valuation.
Chris Kaufman co-founded global marketplace company StockX in 2015, serving as its chief creative officer and playing a key role in the startup’s growth to over 30 million users and a $3.8 billion valuation. He has since stepped back from the company and has dedicated his career to supporting women- and minority-owned startups, advising and investing in over a dozen early-stage businesses. Kaufman is also the author of the book Empathy at Work. Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
Tell me a little more about your business.
StockX is a global marketplace for “current culture” — sneakers, streetwear, collectibles, trading cards, electronics and more, built to function like a stock market rather than a traditional ecommerce site. Buyers place bids, sellers place asks, and when they match, a trade clears at a transparent market price. Every item that doesn’t ship directly from a trusted seller flows through our verification centers, where it’s carefully inspected and verified before going to the buyer, which is a big part of the trust equation.
