Dragon’s Den tycoon Steven Bartlett raises £20m for blockchain firm
A Dragon’s Den tycoon who dropped out of university has raised $24m (£20m) in funding for a new blockchain business in a deal that values the company at £136m.
29-year-old Steven Bartlett launched the tech company, called thirdweb, with co-founder Furqan Rydhan after deciding there wasn’t enough digital infrastructure to help start-ups build their own blockchain technology platforms.
Bartlett told the Standard: “Before the third web, if you’re a developer, you have to learn a new coding language and it can take you a year or two to build an application. Using third web, you can build an application in a few clicks.
“When there’s a gold rush, you have people looking for the gold, or you have people making the shovels.”
The funding round was led by Haun Ventures and includes commitments from e-commerce platform Shopify and crypto firm Coinbase Ventures. Major investors in the company’s previous seed funding round include serial entrepreneurs Gary Vaynerchuck and Mark Cuban. Cuban is one of the 600 richest people in the world with a fortune of £3.9 billion, according to Forbes.
“I think it’s fair to say that both myself and Furqan as founders have the track record we have, we could have funded Thirdweb ourselves, but the strategic support we’re getting now from these partners is even more important to us than the capital itself.”, Bartlett said.
Blockchain technology and the crypto firms that operate on it have attracted controversy in recent months, with a record £1.6 billion worth of cryptocurrency stolen in hacking services in the year to July 2022, according to blockchain platform Chainalysis, which organized cybercriminals and malicious. state actors exploit vulnerabilities in decentralized finance. Bartlett was not alarmed by these reports.
“The underlying blockchain technology is incredibly secure. I think in web1, web2 or web3 there will always be vulnerabilities to systems and technologies, and I think web3 as a technology actually solves tons of the security issues,” he said.
Bartlett rose to fame after joining the BBC show Dragon’s Den in January as the show’s youngest dragon. The entrepreneur has attracted thousands of listeners to his “Diary of a CEO” podcast, where he interviewed the likes of former health secretary Matt Hancock and billionaire Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong.
“If Dragon’s has taught me anything, it’s that people invest in people, and so I always keep that in mind when raising money for my own companies,” he said.
Bartlett first achieved major business success with his social media company Social Chain, which he co-founded in 2014. The company merged with German company Lumaland before listing on the German stock exchange in 2019, valuing the company at over $200 million.
