Blockchains are public databases, but that doesn’t mean they’re legible. Even experts struggle to read their complicated strings of letters, numbers, and transactions. Still, with enough savvy, the troves of data on blockchains become more manageable. New York-based Allium has made a business of taming digital asset data, and top-flight investors believe the crypto analytics startup has a shot at continuing to grow.
On Tuesday, the company announced that it raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Amplify Partners. Other investors include Kleiner Perkins and Theory Ventures. Ethan Chan, cofounder and CEO of Allium, declined to say at what valuation he raised the capital.
Chan says institutional players like Visa and even the U.S. Federal Reserve have cited Allium’s data. “It’s never been a better time for the institutional side,” he added, referring to the swathe of Wall Street firms diving into blockchain.
Controlling the data source
Blockchain analytics companies aren’t unique. As crypto boomed a decade ago, a proliferation of startups promised to make sense of the deluge of coins, projects, and blockchains. But, during the recent crypto downturn that’s seen Bitcoin more than halve in price since October, analytics startups have suffered.
In May, Dune Analytics, which was valued at $1 billion in a 2022 fundraise, laid off 25% of its staff. And, one month later, the crypto data company Blockworks acquired competitor Messari for more than $10 million, a steep discount to Messari’s valuation of approximately $300 million in 2022. The landscape is fraught, but Allium cofounder Chan believes that, for the survivors, increased institutional interest in crypto and the rise of AI are potential boons.
In fact, before Chan cofounded Allium, he studied AI at Stanford University and saw that AI models lived or died depending on the quality of data fed into them. That’s why, amid the crypto bull market in 2021, he and cofounder Cheng Han Lee decided to create their own startup that made sense of hard-to-parse blockchain data. “It goes back to the lessons that I learned from machine learning,” Chan told Fortune. “You have to control the data source.”
Over the past five years, he and his team of now 50 employees have built a business on cleaning data for established firms like Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm and Coinbase. Controlling the data source has Chan even working with perceived competitors. DefiLlama, another blockchain analytics outfit, sources some of its data from Allium.
Now, as many entrepreneurs predict that AI will handle an increasing portion of financial transactions, Chan believes Allium will be even more in demand. Fintech companies like Stripe believe that blockchains and stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar, are the best means for AI agents to pay one another.
And that’s what has David Beyer, a partner at Amplify Partners, excited. “The really, really big upside for them ultimately is the agentic piece,” he said.
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