Tobi Lütke: Shopify Founder and CEO Profile

Tobias “Tobi” Lütke is the founder and chief executive officer of Shopify, the Canadian commerce software company that powers online and in-store sales for millions of merchants. He is also chairman of its board, and he has steered it from a small online shop into a listed business with about 7,600 employees.

Shopify now handles a large share of online retail. Shopify reported $11.6 billion in revenue for 2025, and merchants on its platform sold goods worth $378 billion that year, with the company putting its share of US e-commerce above 14 percent.

Career

Lütke trained himself as a programmer. In a 2012 interview with The Globe and Mail he said he had spent much of his youth on computers, and he later used those skills to build an online store for snowboards with a partner in 2004.

Shopify Inc. was incorporated on September 28, 2004, according to its annual report. The company released its commerce platform to other merchants in 2006.

Raising money was slow at first. He told an interviewer in 2014 that his early meetings with venture capital firms went badly because investors did not understand what he was building.

By December 2013 the picture had changed. Shopify raised $100 million that month in a round led by OMERS Ventures and Insight Venture Partners, and more than 100,000 businesses were using its software.

In November 2014 the Report on Business Magazine of The Globe and Mail named Lütke its CEO of the Year. At the time Shopify had about 500 employees and offices in Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal, and its merchants had recently passed $5 billion in total sales.

Lütke took Shopify public in May 2015. Its shares were priced at US$17 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange, and the offering closed on May 27, 2015, with gross proceeds of about US$150.5 million. The company’s shares now trade on Nasdaq and the TSX.

In November 2018 the Governor General of Canada presented him with the Meritorious Service Cross (Civil Division) at Rideau Hall. The citation described him as the driving force behind Shopify and noted his support for Canada’s technology sector through work with steering committees and colleges and universities.

On May 21, 2020, with more than 5,000 employees working from home, Lütke announced that Shopify would become “digital by default”. Offices would stay closed until 2021 and then reopen as places to gather, while most staff would keep working remotely.

In January 2022 Coinbase announced that Lütke would join its board of directors. The crypto exchange said his experience would help it reach more people and businesses around the world.

A year later Shopify narrowed its focus. In May 2023 it agreed to sell most of its logistics business to Flexport in exchange for a 13 percent stake in that company, and the sale was completed on June 6, 2023.

In April 2025 Lütke published an internal memo that set new rules on the use of artificial intelligence at Shopify. Teams asking for more staff or resources first had to show why the work could not be done with AI tools.

Current Roles

Founder and chief executive officer, Shopify
Chairman of the board of directors, Shopify

Key Achievements

From one store to millions of merchants

What began as software for a single shop now serves millions of merchants from more than 175 countries. At the end of 2025, 44 percent of them were in the United States, 31 percent in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and 16 percent in Asia Pacific.

Gross merchandise volume of $378.4 billion in 2025, up from $292.3 billion in 2024
Monthly recurring revenue of $205 million at the end of 2025

Growth with profit

Shopify’s revenue rose 30 percent in 2025, faster than in each of the three previous years, while free cash flow reached about $2 billion. The company said it had delivered ten straight quarters of double-digit free cash flow margins and launched a $2 billion share buyback.

Revenue of $11.556 billion in 2025, up from $8.880 billion in 2024
Operating income of $1.468 billion in 2025
Fourth-quarter 2025 revenue of $3.672 billion, up 31 percent

Payments and checkout

Most of Shopify’s revenue now comes from merchant solutions, led by Shopify Payments. Merchant solutions brought in $8.8 billion in 2025, or 76 percent of the total, and Shop Pay volume grew 62 percent that year.

Other parts of the business also expanded in 2025. International revenue rose 36 percent, offline revenue from in-store sales rose 27 percent, and gross merchandise volume from business-to-business sales grew 96 percent from a small base.

Lütke runs the company with a senior team that includes Harley Finkelstein, president, and Jeff Hoffmeister, chief financial officer. Shopify lists its principal executive offices in Ottawa and New York.

Remote work and AI as company policy

Lütke has used direct written policies to change how Shopify works, first with the 2020 move to remote work and then with the 2025 AI memo. The memo also asked staff to learn the tools by using them often and to seek feedback from colleagues on how it was going.

Shopify is also among the early customers that Constellation Research named for Google’s new workplace assistant, as our report on how Google Cloud launches Gemini agent notes.