Earning a unique badge of honour, Shopify has now become both the first—and the second—publicly traded company in Canada to achieve a $300 billion market capitalization.
The Ottawa-born e-commerce pioneer first recorded the achievement in November of 2021 during the Covid Pandemic and the world’s subsequent rush online.
However, that moment was brief, and market realities eventually pulled Shopify’s cap back down closer to $200B.
Since then, it should be noted that the Royal Bank of Canada has spent far more time as Canada’s biggest public firm.
But this year, Shopify’s momentum has been undeniable, slowly but steadily gaining on the nation’s premier bank.
And this month, exactly four years later, the company surpassed RBC—itself floating around an all-time high of $290B—to hit that fabled $300B market once more.
Shopify has been actively pushing AI-powered tools and crypto-related features this year, driving some of the company’s tremendous growth.
For example, merchants can now sell directly through conversations with artificial intelligence models thanks to a collaboration with OpenAI alongside Etsy and Stripe.
And chief executive officer Tobi Lütke (a proud AI enthusiast) announced at a recent Coinbase conference in New York that the e-commerce platform will enable merchants to accept payment via USDC.
“We think that stablecoins are a natural way to transact on the Internet and worked with coinbase to develop the commerce payment protocol smart contract that powers this work,” stated Lütke.
“We are extremely aligned with everything that crypto stands for,” the CEO said.
Shopify was founded in Ottawa by Lütke alongside Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake in 2006 to sell snowboards.
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