Afterpay’s Nick Molnar backs social media startup Linktree in $59m raising

Social media startup Linktree is looking to tap into the nascent social commerce market with its latest capital raising of $US45 million ($59 million) from strategic investors including billionaire Afterpay co-founder Nick Molnar.

The Melbourne-based startup was co-founded by brothers Alex Zaccaria and Anthony Zaccaria and their friend Nick Humphreys in 2016. It enables users to link all their social media accounts and websites in one stack.

“Nick [Molnar], we chose him because he’s scaled a company in Australia,” chief executive Alex Zaccaria said. “Also from a product perspective being so across fintech, and we are really investing heavily in being the future of social commerce, we are definitely excited to work with Nick more.”

Linktree co-founders Alex Zaccaria, Anthony Zaccaria, and Nick Humphreys.

Linktree started out as a link-in-bio tool for Instagram, but has grown to 12 million users across a variety of social media platforms. It is focused on social commerce, which will enable these users to make money with their social media presence.

“We’ve already soft-launched a ‘support me’ link, which is designed to help users be able to gather support from their visitors in the form of tips,” Mr Zaccaria said. “That’s really just the start of a very big range of commerce offerings.”

Alongside Mr Molnar, investors in the funding round include local venture firm Airtree Ventures, US-based fund Index Ventures and Coatue, an investor in TikTok. LinkedIn executive chairman Jeff Weiner, former Bumble executive Michelle Kennedy and former chief product officer at Slack April Underwood are also backers.

The fresh funding follows a $US10.7 million capital raising in October. Mr Zaccaria said the need for more cash so soon after reflected the startup’s fast pace of growth after it added 4 million users in the last three months.

“We took the opportunity to build the team, bring on the extra capital, pour fuel on the fire and be able to really scale our team and help Linktree get to where we are going,” he said.

He said Linktree’s push into multiple platforms has made the startup less exposed to the whims of the social media giants.

“Linktree now is super diversified and doesn’t necessarily rely on any one particular platform,” Mr Zaccaria said. “We actually see it as an enhancement, and Facebook themselves actually use Linktree and so do Instagram and [Facebook] Messenger and WhatsApp and TikTok. So we have a great working relationship with those platforms.”

That relationship has improved from 2018, when Instagram temporarily blocked Linktree before apologising and reinstating the platform after thousands of users advocated on Linktree’s behalf. Instagram now accounts for less than 40 per cent of Linktree’s profile traffic, with a growing amount of traffic coming direct from Linktree itself.

Mr Zaccaria was unfazed by the growing number of competitors in the space, with Carrd, LinkInBio and TapBio all launching similar platforms.

“We created the category, there was nothing else around when we started and I think it’s been really fascinating to watch the space grow,” he said.

Investor Jackie Vullinghs, of Airtree Ventures, said her fund believed Linktree was going to be the next iconic consumer software company to come out of Australia.

“We think with its position in the multiple social profiles of creators around the world Linktree is in a prime position to shape social commerce,” she said. “There is a new type of consumer software product emerging. You have seen this emerge in China first, where you are blending people’s social and online identities with their ability to monetise their craft.”

Coatue chairman Dan Rose said Linktree was widely adopted and making money at an early stage.

“Charging for features that premium users would want to access is a very natural way for this business to grow,” he said.

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