Shopify Rebellion Welcomes New Co-Owners Cr1TiKaL and Ludwig

Shopify Rebellion is super excited to welcome Ludwig Ahgren and Charlie White Jr. (Cr1TiKaL) co-owners going into the 2025 season. In addition to them joining the organization as owners, SR will also be welcoming in Moist's Apex Legends, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and Street Fighter 6 players teams. We're excited to share more details about what this means in the near future; in the meantime, here's a letter from our founder:

 

I think I’ll always consider the Fall of 2019 to be the real genesis of Shopify Rebellion. Tobi and I had been watching the HomeStory Cup (HSC) taking place in a massive indoor water park over in Germany. We were more or less just gushing about it, having a special affinity for these organizers clearly punching above their weight and as fans of similar feeling Dota events from Beyond the Summit. We thought it would be fun to get involved in some way, and I suggested that I would touch base with the organizers to see how we could support the next one. It wasn’t more than a few minutes of radio silence after that remark that Tobi let me know he donated $25,000 to the prize pool (doubling it at the time), and only shortly after that when news broke on the broadcast itself. 

I was on the next plane to Berlin.

Later the next day I entered the former airship hangar turned faux tropical island where I met TLO (Dario) for the first time. Given the venue and our eventual path to Moist, it feels like that was more of a sign from the universe than we both realized at the time. 

While that certainly wasn’t the first esports event I had been to (over the years I’d been to Counter Strike Majors, Rocket League world championships, local lans, BYOCs and everything in between) – it was notably special. It was a crew of passionate organizers, world class talent, and enthusiastic fans all coming together in a celebration of something meaningful. The prize pool was modest, the budget was tight, but everyone there gave a shit. To me, this was esports.

While the scale can vary, I consider esports an industry driven by passion. Passion that creates incredible, magical, memorable moments on both local and global scales, but passion that can also be exploited, abused and manipulated by those with a different agenda. This is why, after getting home from Germany we were faced with an important decision. We knew we wanted to stay involved in esports, growing the seed we felt was planted with HSC, but there were many paths to do that. It would have been pretty easy to saddle up with any of the long standing ‘traditional’ esports orgs that started flooding my inbox with sponsorship opportunities, but something didn’t sit right there. Many organizations were clearly over-leveraged and the numbers being thrown out for name or media sponsorship were eye watering. Combine that with the litany of horror stories that had been published around poor player treatment, mismanagement, or shady ownership – and it became more clear that the traditional sponsorship path wasn’t for us. 

As a company, Shopify has always been a place for builders. Part of the reason I’m still here after 8 years is because I believe it’s a place where great ideas are given an opportunity for great execution. That culture allowed for the birth of Rebellion – an esports organization we would build, own and operate (the name a nod to how we viewed our platform and the support we had for those independent entrepreneurs, or rebels). Fast forward just a couple of years later and my, how things have changed…

It’s been a big week here! We’re fresh off the exciting announcement that we’re the newest organization teaming up with Razer, a group who are as player focused as we are and whose mice, headsets and keyboard are already well loved by our teams (don’t tell anyone I’m using the Sentinel’s edition Viper V3 Pro currently…) And today, we’re welcoming Ludwig and Charles (MoistCr1TiKaL) as new co-owners of Rebellion. Over the last year we’ve been working together both publicly (with projects like MxS Valorant) but also behind the scenes, supporting each other's teams and programs and realizing pretty quickly that we were headed the same direction on how we wanted to build in esports over the next decade and beyond. Coming together allows us to field more and stronger teams, invest deeper for fans, provide more to our players and create a singular, more resilient organization over the long-term.

If you’ve given any support to Rebellion, our teams, players or staff in the past – thank you – we really do feed off that energy. If you’re a fan of Moist Esports, Charles or Lud, I hope we can continue to earn your support – it’s not something we’ll ever take for granted.

- Jeremy