Wayfair

Wayfair sells furniture, decor and home improvement goods online to consumers and businesses, operating the Wayfair site alongside the AllModern, Birch Lane, Joss & Main and Perigold brands. Niraj Shah and Steve Conine, Cornell graduates who had previously built other companies together, founded the business in Boston in August 2002 as CSN Stores, starting with a site that sold media stands. By 2011 it ran more than 200 niche web stores, which it consolidated under the Wayfair name that September. Shah remains chief executive.

The founders bootstrapped CSN Stores for nearly a decade. Its first institutional capital came in June 2011, when it sold $165.0 million of Series A preferred stock to eight investors; Battery Ventures put in $35.0 million, Great Hill Partners $65.0 million and HarbourVest Partners $40.0 million, with Spark Capital also joining the round, and the company used about $87.7 million of the proceeds to buy back existing equity. A $36.3 million Series A extension followed in November 2012. In March 2014 the company sold $157.2 million of Series B preferred stock to 23 investors in a round led by T. Rowe Price that valued Wayfair at more than $2 billion. Partners from Battery, Great Hill, HarbourVest and Spark all joined the board in June 2011.

Wayfair went public on the New York Stock Exchange in October 2014, selling 11 million Class A shares at $29.00 each for gross proceeds of $319 million. At the offering Great Hill held about 11.3 percent of the shares, HarbourVest 6.9 percent and Battery 6.1 percent, while each founder held 28.5 percent. Revenue grew from $1.32 billion in 2014 to $4.72 billion in 2017 and peaked during the pandemic. It was $12.46 billion in 2025, according to the company's annual report. Wayfair was also the defendant in South Dakota v. Wayfair (2018), the Supreme Court case that let states collect sales tax from out-of-state online sellers. Since 2020 it has cut jobs several times, and in 2025 it left the German and Austrian markets.

For investors, Wayfair shows a late, growth-equity style entry into a company that was already profitable on its own. Battery Ventures, a venture firm, invested next to private equity firms Great Hill and HarbourVest in a business that had reached roughly $380 million in revenue in 2010 without outside money. Their entry came about nine years after founding, and they reached a public market just over three years after the first check. Because the founders kept majority ownership and Class B voting control through the IPO, the outside investors made money without ever controlling the company.