QuickNode raises $60M at $800M valuation to become ‘AWS or Azure of blockchain’ • TechCrunch

QuickNode, a blockchain distribution platform, has raised $60 million in a Series B round for a valuation of $800 million, the company’s CEO and co-founder, Alex Nabutovsky, told TechCrunch.

The round was led by 10T Fund, with participation from, among others, Tiger Global, Seven Seven Six Ventures and QED Investors. This fundraising comes about 15 months after the company’s $35 million Series A round. In total, the firm has raised more than $105 million, Nabutovsky said.

“When we raised a $35 million round, we were 20 people. Now we are over 120 people, Nabutovsky said. “We’re going to continue to grow the team. The amount of companies coming in is incredible, so we want to continue to build these abstraction layers, expand our technology and expand into new regions.”

While the capital will focus on expansion, the company also wants to use the funding to increase blockchain adoption, Nabutovsky said. “If we’re going to have mass adoption of blockchain like we’ve seen in the last year, you have to provide enterprise-grade infrastructure,” he said.

Founded in 2017, QuickNode aimed to bring Web 2.0 infrastructure to web3, but that snowballed over time, Nabutovsky said. The third and fourth quarters of 2022 were “record quarters for revenue,” as they surged over 300% thanks to Web 2.0 giants and web3-native companies piling into the space, he added.

Its customer base includes major Web2.0 companies such as Twitter and Adobe, as well as web3 platforms such as Coinbase, OpenSea, Chainlink, 1inch Network, Dune Analytics and Phantom.

The platform handles over 200 billion API requests monthly, and is “always available” with 99.99% uptime, meaning only four days of downtime per year, according to Nabutovsky. “Many of our customers came here because we are able to guarantee 99.99% reliability, latency and speed,” he said.

It also works with 16 blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche and Abritrum, according to the site. “We plan to add another four to five chains at least by the end of this year,” Nabutovsky said.

“We have over 50,000 developers on the platform who are constantly asking for new things. But for us, the roadmap is always to add protocols and work with these foundations. It’s not just having a protocol, but a relationship to build with the foundation to be an extension of their ecosystems, so they and their developers can have a better experience, he said.

The long-term goal for QuickNode is “simple,” Nabutovsky said.

“We want to get to the point where any company that wants to build or interact with blockchain [technology] will use us,” Nabutovsky added. “We’d like to be AWS or Azure for blockchain. The industry is very ripe for it, and the production that is happening is staggering.”