Spice AI raises $13.5 million to accelerate development of blockchain applications
Startup Spice AI Inc., which works to facilitate the development of blockchain applications, today announced that it has secured a seed round of 13.5 million dollars led by Madrona Venture Group.
More than half a dozen other investors participated in the round alongside Madrona. The group included Thomas Dohmke, CEO of Microsoft Corp.’s GitHub subsidiary, as well as several institutional investors.
Seattle-based Spice AI offers a cloud platform that promises to simplify the task of building blockchain applications. In addition, the platform enables developers to equip their software with artificial intelligence capabilities.
Blockchain implementations generate data that can be useful for application projects. For example, the Ethereum blockchain provides access to data on cryptocurrency transactions. Ethereum transaction records can be used by cryptocurrency applications for tasks such as monitoring digital asset prices.
Incorporating blockchain information into an application typically requires a significant amount of manual work. Developers must collect the information, stream it to a centralized computing environment and organize it in a form that facilitates processing. Each step in the process often requires a separate software tool.
Spice AI’s platform, currently in preview, promises to automate the task of adding blockchain data to applications. The platform aggregates data from popular blockchains such as Ethereum and makes it available through relatively simple application programming interfaces. According to Spice AI, the APIs are easier to use than the tools that developers typically rely on to accomplish the task.
The APIs make it possible to interact with blockchain data using the widely used SQL query language. According to the startup, developers can not only access information, but also combine different records and perform other data operations. Spice AI says the platform can run a query on as many as millions of records in a matter of seconds.
Spice AI makes blockchain information collected by the platform available in the Apache Arrow data format. The format includes optimizations that speed up certain analysis tasks. Alternatively, developers can have the platform organize data in the JSON format, which is also widely used by analytics applications.
Some applications that process blockchain data include machine learning capabilities. To facilitate the development of such software, Spice AI has created an open source tool called Spice that automates some of the tasks involved in implementing machine learning algorithms. According to the startup, the tool can be deployed as a software container and supports several popular AI development frameworks.
Spice AI was launched last year by CEO Luke Kim and Chief Technology Officer Phillip LeBlanc. Kim previously co-founded Microsoft’s Azure Incubations unit, which develops new technologies for the company’s Azure public cloud. LeBlanc held engineering roles at Microsoft and GitHub.
“There is no ecosystem out there that is more data-rich than Web3 and blockchains, but that space is currently hampered by a lack of data access and infrastructure,” Kim said. “Solving the data problem in Web3 requires deep domain knowledge and Spice AI builds the infrastructure so developers don’t have to deal with the complexity of building it themselves.”
Spice AI has reportedly signed up 10 customers to its platform since its launch last year. These customers include companies in markets such as financial services, fraud detection and retail. To increase its market presence, Spice AI plans to hire more employees as well as expand operations in Asia and Australia.
