Introducing Turtles: Our vision

Today we’re launching Turtles.com, the AI platform for marketplaces. Our mission is simple: help anyone turn their passion into a marketplace, and give every marketplace the infrastructure it needs to grow.

Marketplaces are some of the internet’s best businesses. They are also notoriously hard to start. A marketplace needs supply, demand, trust, payments, search, support, and a reason for people to keep coming back. The result is a world thin on the marketplaces we actually want.

For years, those costs pushed the internet toward generic, catch-all marketplaces. If building the infrastructure was expensive, the rational move was to serve as many categories as possible from one place. AI changes that. It makes the operational work lighter, the catalog easier to build, and the software more adaptable to the needs of each category.

Thousands of passions, like rare art, outdoor experiences, military surplus, or even vintage cameras, have no dedicated place with their own curation and culture. The ones that do often took a generation to build, slowly and steadily like the tortoise in Aesop’s fable.

What Turtles does

Turtles gives builders the platform to launch those marketplaces faster. The Turtles platform powers the infrastructure behind each marketplace, so builders can focus on community, curation, and growth.

AI lets Turtles make marketplace infrastructure feel specific without requiring every builder to start from scratch. Listings, search, recommendations, moderation, support, and merchandising can adapt to the category, whether the marketplace is for vintage cameras, rare guitars, designer furniture, or something no one has built yet.

Every marketplace running on Turtles can start with the core commerce layer already in place:

• Listings and catalog tools that help sellers get products live without heavy manual work.
• Search and recommendations that make discovery feel natural inside a specific category.
• Payments, payouts, and trust and safety so transactions can happen with confidence.
• Support and fulfillment for the operational work that makes a marketplace reliable.

Turtles also helps iconic brands like Nike, LEGO, and Jimmy Choo reach shoppers across marketplaces powered by Turtles, with products highlighted where they are most relevant.

Why it matters

The last few years have made the marketplace opportunity obvious. Whatnot, SHEIN, and Temu have shown how large new commerce formats can become when shopping is social, fast, and game-like. Millions of people are willing to discover, bid, buy, and come back when the experience has energy.

We think AI will create a renaissance of smaller, more curated marketplaces. The next wave will not be bigger catalogs and faster feeds. It will be marketplaces that feel built for a specific passion, with better taste, higher trust, and software that understands the category deeply.

But scale alone is not the future we want. The best marketplaces will understand their category, set quality bars, and make shoppers feel like they are in the right place, not browsing a generic flea market.

Turtles exists so builders do not have to choose between a generic storefront and years of custom infrastructure. They can start with a platform built for marketplaces, then spend their time on the thing that actually makes the marketplace work: community, supply, curation, and taste.

What’s next

We are introducing Turtles publicly after building in stealth. We have been supporting marketplace launches, acquiring marketplaces where Turtles can accelerate what is already working, and bringing brands into the network.

Today, we proudly power marketplaces serving millions of shoppers and help the world’s best brands connect with relevant audiences across Turtles.

In the near term, we are prioritizing marketplace launches with partners who can bring immediate demand: large brands, existing marketplaces, celebrities, and influencers with large audiences. We are especially focused on partners we believe can build $10M+ GMV marketplaces on Turtles.

The next great marketplace may start as a category you love or a community that you think deserves better. We’d love to help you make it a reality.