Shopify (SHOP): Building the Underlying Rails for the Era of Agentic Commerce
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Baillie Gifford & Co, an independent investment management firm, released its third-quarter 2026 investor letter for “US Equity Growth Strategy”. The letter can be downloaded here. While AI safety and human control concerns dominated recent industry discussions, the quarterly letter highlights the massive, untapped potential of deploying existing AI capacity into industrial applications. The letter emphasizes identifying sustainable competitive advantages in business model integration over temporary semiconductor scarcity or raw model scale. Against this backdrop, the US Growth portfolio posted positive returns, outperforming the S&P 500 and Russell 1000 Growth indices by approximately four percentage points this quarter. This marks a continued recovery over the past six months, following a difficult end to 2025 and the onset of 2026, supported by fundamental company-level progress. YTD, the portfolio returned -6.7% (net) compared to the S&P 500 Index’s 15.7%. Also, check the strategy’s top five holdings to see its best picks in 2026.
In its Q3 2026 investor letter, Baillie Gifford US Equity Growth Strategy highlighted Shopify Inc. (NASDAQ:SHOP) as a notable performance contributor. Shopify Inc. (NASDAQ:SHOP) is a Canadian e-commerce technology company that provides a cloud-based platform for individuals and companies to create and manage their operations. On October 09, 2026, Shopify Inc. (NASDAQ:SHOP) closed at $170.85, with a $221.70 billion market capitalization. Shopify Inc. (NASDAQ:SHOP) posted a 9.83% YTD gain, trading within a 52-week range of $94.00 to $182.19.
Baillie Gifford US Equity Growth Strategy stated the following regarding Shopify Inc. (NASDAQ:SHOP) in its Q3 2026 investor letter:
“For example, how does a company use AI to create more value from its distribution, proprietary data, customer relationships, network effects, intellectual property, physical assets and even its culture?
Shopify Inc. (NASDAQ:SHOP) tells a similar story. It already provides much of the infrastructure through which merchants run their online businesses. Commerce is evolving from a world where consumers browse websites to one where agents do more of the searching, comparing and, eventually, transacting on their behalf. This could mean that the underlying rails of commerce, such as payments, product data, identity, fulfilment and merchant relationships, should become more critical for agents to operate. We do not know exactly what agentic commerce will look like. Neither does Shopify. But Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lütke is positioning the company to adapt and embed its gates and rails as things progress.
Snowflake and Shopify were also positive contributors. Shopify grew revenue by 34 percent and generated substantial free cash flow. In both cases, operating progress helped challenge the market’s earlier pessimism about software. “
