$10 billion crypto developer platform Alchemy buys coding bootcamp as first-time acquisition
Web3 developer infrastructure startup Alchemy, which last raised a $200 million Series C1 last February, just made its first ever acquisition — and it’s in the education space. The company acquired education startup ChainShot, which runs coding bootcamps for aspiring web3 developers, Alchemy co-founder and CEO Nikil Viswanathan told TechCrunch exclusively. Alchemy did not disclose the terms of the deal.
For Alchemy, the acquisition seems like a good fit considering that the company’s goal is to be the starting point for developers who want to build apps on the blockchain. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is often referred to web3 and says it has seen a 10-fold increase in the number of teams building on the platform in the past 12 months. Its valuation has grown at a dizzying rate, too, even for a crypto startup — it was valued at $10.2 billion just 16 months after launching.
That rapid growth has certainly gotten the attention of investors, a group that includes high-profile names like Lightspeed, Silver Lake, a16z, Coatue and Pantera. The company says it powers over $150 billion in transactions annually for clients including NFT platform OpenSea and DeFi app Quantstamp.
The goal, ChainShot, began as a hackathon project at the ETHDenver conference in 2018, ChainShot co-founder Cody McCabe told TechCrunch in an interview. McCabe, who was inspired to found ChainShot after going through a coding bootcamp himself, said the company was bootstrapped before Alchemy bought it. In addition to the founders’ personal capital (which McCabe said included funds previously in his 401k), ChainShot covered costs largely through grants available through its connection to the Ethereum ecosystem as well as through the web3 crowdfunding platform Gitcoin, he added.
While ChainShot declined to share the actual number of students it works with, the company hinted at its 180% growth in student enrollment since January 2022.
Over half of the students who have gone through the program have found employment within six months of graduating, McCabe said. That certainly seems high compared to other coding bootcamps like Lambda School, which reportedly has around a 30% placement rate – and it’s worth noting that many of the best-known coding bootcamps are believed to have exaggerated their placement numbers.
ChainShot founders Dan Nolan and Cody McCabe Image credit: ChainShot
Another web3-focused coding bootcamp, Encode Club, told TechCrunch in May that it had a 50% placement rate, similar to ChainShot, but it primarily accepted experienced coders into the program. ChainShot, on the other hand, no longer has a vetting process for its students, and when it did in the past, it looked for “people who were trying to actively change and get into the ecosystem” rather than experienced software engineers, McCabe said.
“We looked at all the education platforms in the space and the results spoke for themselves when it came to ChainShot being the best,” said Viswanathan.
ChainShot’s program is currently built around its 10-week holistic bootcamp tailored for developers looking to build on Ethereum, McCabe explained. The company plans to add more asynchronous content, such as videos, as it integrates with Alchemy, and it also hopes to expand its offerings to other blockchains over time, he added, noting that ChainShot only had four employees last year .
Once rolled up in Alchemy, ChainShot will join the crypto infrastructure company’s two other education-related properties, the coding programs Web3 U and Road to Web3. It will also drop the fees it previously charged students and offer the product at no cost instead, a longtime goal of ChainShot’s that is now possible under the Alchemy umbrella, McCabe said.
As for Alchemy, Viswanathan indicated that it will continue to keep an eye on potential acquisition targets, particularly in the developer tools space, as it looks to significantly expand its offering with a team of 90 employees.
“We’re a small team … if we had 500 people, everyone would be working 24/7 and we’d be pumping out a bunch more products, but we have a lot of things that we just can’t build because of our bandwidth limitations when it applies to engineering capabilities. So we will always look to expand our services,” said Viswanathan.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about how to provide a great experience for people building in web3, and if we see a team that has a product that enables a better experience for our customers, we’re definitely excited to work with them,” he added.
