Alchemy, a Coinbase-backed tech startup raises $80 million in Series B funding to power the NFT boom

Back in January, we wrote about Alchemy after the Coinbase-backed tech startup partnered with Crypto.com to power its developer platform, further expanding the Crypto.com Chain support ecosystem. For those of you who don’t know Alchemy, it’s the world’s most powerful blockchain developer platform, powering $15 Billion in on-chain transactions and relied upon by 70% of the world’s top Ethereum apps.

Today, the San Francisco-based Alchemy announced it has raised another $80 million in series B funding led by Coatue and Addition, with participation from the Glazer family, who own the Tampa Bay Buccaneers; the band The Chainsmokers; and DFJ Growth — an investor in Stripe, SpaceX and Coinbase. The new capital infusion brings Alchemy’s valuation to $500 million.

Founded in 2017 by Stanford classmates Nikil Viswanathan and Joe Lau, Alchemy provides the leading blockchain development platform powering millions of users in 197 countries worldwide. The startup is benefitting from the recent boom in digital collectibles through the companies it helps power. Alchemy is more of a middleman, sitting between blockchain infrastructure and apps like NBA TopShot that consumers interact with.

Alchemy’s platform has been used to create Dapper Labs, which made CryptoKitties, a popular platform NBA Top Shot, the largest NFT marketplace OpenSea, and others. For example, the record-breaking $69 million nonfungible tokens sold by digital artist Beeple, was powered by Alchemy.

“When cryptocurrencies took off, we saw it and said: ‘This is the next big technology shift,’” Alchemy CEO Viswanathan said in a Zoom interview. “The huge problem was that developers didn’t have any kind of infrastructure or tools. We wanted to make it really easy for them to unlock that potential.”