Top 25 Social Shopping Companies in the UK | 2026

UK social shopping companies have raised £3.43b in equity to date, though that headline conceals an extraordinary concentration: a single company, DAZN, accounts for nearly 89% of it. Funding peaked at £1.41b in 2021 on the back of one of DAZN’s mega-rounds, and 86% of all the capital the sector has ever raised has arrived since the start of 2020.

We’ve ranked the top 25 social shopping companies by total equity raised (all data sourced from the Beauhurst platform).

An overview of the social shopping sector

Social shopping covers companies that blend e-commerce with social interaction — platforms where buying is driven by community, recommendation, live video, resale, or peer-to-peer exchange rather than a conventional storefront. In practice the UK sector is a small, tightly defined niche spanning fashion resale and rental, live-stream and social commerce, and discovery tools built around reviews and AI personalisation. The classification overlaps heavily with application software, online marketplaces, and social media, and several of its members are tagged across all three.

There are just 42 active social shopping companies in the UK, a figure that has roughly doubled over the past decade from 20 at the end of 2015 but remains tiny by any measure. Together they report £5.31b in turnover and employ an estimated 7,400 people — though, as with funding, those totals are overwhelmingly a function of DAZN’s scale. The £3.43b raised makes this comfortably the smallest sector Beauhurst tracks by equity, and stripping out its dominant player leaves a field that has collectively raised under £400m.

Key findings

Top 25 social shopping companies in the UK

The future of social shopping in the UK

Social shopping in the UK is less a single market than a cluster of experiments around one durable idea: that commerce works better when it is social, visual, and community-led. The data shows a niche that has never scaled into a broad sector — fewer than 50 active companies, most of them small — yet one that keeps attracting fresh attempts as new formats emerge. Live-stream shopping, resale, and AI-driven discovery have each had their moment, and the arrival of generative AI assistants is opening another. The challenge has always been the same: turning social engagement into durable, profitable transaction volume against platforms like Instagram and TikTok that increasingly build shopping in natively.

Within the top 25, three clusters capture where the energy sits. Resale and circular fashion is the most established theme, with Depop (£77.0m), Luxury Promise (£13.9m), HURR (£12.8m), and So Just Shop (£0.5m) building marketplaces for pre-owned, rented, and ethically made goods. A live-stream and social-commerce cluster is chasing the format that has reshaped retail in Asia, led by Tilt (£36.3m), WeShop (£18.2m), Go Places (£6.0m), and FINDS (£2.6m). And a discovery, reviews, and AI-personalisation group spans Lyst (£122m), TruRating (£43.9m), Reevoo (£17.1m), Catches (£5.2m), and the generative-AI newcomer Merx (£1.0m).

With this in mind, it’s possible that — depending on whether UK consumers adopt live-stream shopping as enthusiastically as Asian markets have, whether resale’s circular-economy momentum keeps drawing capital, and whether generative AI lets small players compete with the native commerce tools of the social-media giants — social shopping could either consolidate around a few breakout names or remain a perennial proving ground of small, short-lived experiments. The sector’s high mortality rate and tiny scale point towards the latter, but the success of Depop’s resale model and the rapid emergence of AI-native entrants are reminders that the format can still produce winners. The next consumer-behaviour shift will decide whether this niche finally scales or stays a footnote dominated by a single outlier.