With $20 million, Goldsky aims to make blockchain data easy to use

Living up to its lux name, Goldsky announced a $20 million seed round less than a year after the startup’s founding in 2021.

The data infrastructure platform for crypto teams intends to use the funding to rapidly scale its team.

Goldsky hopes the technology will enable it to exploit the reading and processing of crypto data quickly and efficiently, which the startup claims is currently a problem for companies.

“Teams often find themselves doing significant amounts of computing to collect and process decentralized activity.”

According to Goldsky’s co-founder and CEO Kevin Li: “The vast majority of crypto data lives on chains rather than in databases. Even early-stage startups now need both specialized data expertise and a lot of time to ship everything at production scale. The data space is rapidly booming in crypto , and all signs point to a very healthy demand for Goldsky.”

Li noted that one of the most expensive problems in crypto is reading and processing data from deployed smart contracts. “Teams often find themselves performing significant amounts of computing to collect and process decentralized activity,” he said. “This can run into the tens of thousands of dollars and more importantly, take valuable time away from the core product.”

Li co-founded Goldsky with Jeff Ling (CTO) after they met over half a decade ago at the start-up Heap for Digital Insights in Silicon Valley. The pair were among the first engineers at Heap, which is a unicorn company that has raised $110 million USD in 2021, achieving a valuation of $960 million USD.

While Goldsky is based in San Francisco, Ling is from Vancouver, and studied at the University of Toronto. In addition, about half of the startup team works in Vancouver.

Felicis Ventures and Dragonfly Capital led the round, which included investment from a number of angels, including serial investor Elad Gil. Gil was the CEO and co-founder of Mixer Labs, which Twitter acquired. He then worked as VP at Twitter, scaling the company from 90 to 1,500 people. He has since invested in or advised companies such as Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart, Pinterest, Square and Stripe, to name a few.

Other angel investors include Plaid founders Zach Perret and William Hockey, and early Plaid investor Mo Koyfman of Shine Capital. The list of angel investors in Goldsky’s round also extends to Uniswap Labs, 0x Labs and leaders of major crypto projects, including Zhuoxun Yin of Magic Eden, Alex Xu of Azuki and Robert Leshner of Compound Finance.

Goldsky did not disclose the closing date for the round, and by press time had not responded to BetaKit’s questions regarding the funding.

Designed for all crypto engineers, Goldsky’s platform simplifies the setup of APIs and pipelines tailored to a specific protocol or business. The company aims to help teams launch features faster in the emerging industry.

“Goldsky’s mission is to make it easy to index, process and use blockchain data,” Goldsky employee Yaroslav Tkachenko wrote in a blog post in April, explaining why he joined the startup. Tkachenko, who previously worked at Shopify, joined Goldsky as its principal software engineer.

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“Goldsky is not trying to be a solution to all web3 problems,” Tkachenko wrote. “Instead, we want to provide a solid platform for other companies to use blockchain data. Building high-quality web3 products is difficult right now, in part because the tools and practices are so immature. But we see this as a big opportunity.”

It seems Goldsky’s investors agree. Koyfman said “The parallels between crypto and FinTech’s infrastructure needs were immediately apparent to us at Shine. Goldsky provides the essential real-time and reliable blockchain data that web3 applications need to serve their customers effectively.

For his part, Sundeep Peechu, general partner at Felicis, noted that crypto is currently in its “infrastructure phase.” He believed that, as with FinTech or gaming, as blockchain tools improve, it will spur a rapid increase in applications as the effort to go from idea to product shrinks dramatically.

The fact that Felicis is investing in Goldsky is remarkable in itself. Founded in 2006, the venture capital firm has made a name for itself by investing in early-stage startups. More than 91 of its portfolio companies have been acquired or gone public, including Plaid, Adyen, Fitbit, Twitch and Shopify.

Previously, Goldsky raised $1.4 million in seed funding.

Goldsky is not alone in the room. Investing in web3 infrastructure tools that make blockchain easier is becoming increasingly popular.

In Canada, a growing number of Canadian startups are jumping into the sector. Montréal-based StreamingFast secured a $73.5 million CAD grant last year to support a blockchain infrastructure project called The Graph. In addition, Vybe Network raised $13.1 million CAD in early June to provide software and infrastructure that allows users to access and use both real-time and historical data from the Solana blockchain.

Vybe’s CEO and co-founder told BetaKit that “We’ve seen an unprecedented industry need for an infrastructure like Vybe as new innovations in this space evolve rapidly.”

Call it a blockchain data gold rush, and Goldsky is the latest startup to enter the fast-growing space.