Social media startup Linktree is looking to tap into the nascent social commerce market with its latest capital raising of $US45 million ($59 million) from strategic investors including billionaire Afterpay co-founder Nick Molnar.

The Melbourne-based startup was co-founded by brothers Alex Zaccaria and Anthony Zaccaria and their friend Nick Humphreys in 2016. It enables users to link all their social media accounts and websites in one stack.

“Nick [Molnar], we chose him because he’s scaled a company in Australia,” chief executive Alex Zaccaria said. “Also from a product perspective being so across fintech, and we are really investing heavily in being the future of social commerce, we are definitely excited to work with Nick more.”

Linktree started out as a link-in-bio tool for Instagram, but has grown to 12 million users across a variety of social media platforms. It is focused on social commerce, which will enable these users to make money with their social media presence.

“We’ve already soft-launched a ‘support me’ link, which is designed to help users be able to gather support from their visitors in the form of tips,” Mr Zaccaria said. “That’s really just the start of a very big range of commerce offerings.”

Alongside Mr Molnar, investors in the funding round include local venture firm Airtree Ventures, US-based fund Index Ventures and Coatue, an investor in TikTok. LinkedIn executive chairman Jeff Weiner, former Bumble executive Michelle Kennedy and former chief product officer at Slack April Underwood are also backers.

The fresh funding follows a $US10.7 million capital raising in October. Mr Zaccaria said the need for more cash so soon after reflected the startup’s fast pace of growth after it added 4 million users in the last three months.

“We took the opportunity to build the team, bring on the extra capital, pour fuel on the fire and be able to really scale our team and help Linktree get to where we are going,” he said.

He said Linktree’s push into multiple platforms has made the startup less exposed to the whims of the social media giants.