Goldsky raises $20 million to bring real-time on-chain data to crypto companies • TechCrunch

Despite well-known volatility in the crypto market, crypto startups that build infrastructure to support the industry’s long-term growth have appeared to outperform their peers. This is especially true for data, a universally necessary input for web3 companies, with crypto data firms like Messari reportedly raising money in a bearish market.

Goldsky, a data infrastructure company for crypto startups, has raised $20 million in a seed round led by Felicis and Dragonfly Capital. The round brings their total funding to $22 million, which includes capital from angel investors such as Elad Gil, Plaid founders Zach Perret and William Hockey, Zhuoxun Yin of Magic Eden and Uniswap Labs.

The company’s co-founder and CEO Kevin Li said that while Goldsky closed its seed round before this summer’s dip in crypto prices, the company’s focus on infrastructure has given it an edge in bear market conditions.

Goldsky co-founder and CEO Kevin Li. Image credit: Goldsky

“I think there are a lot of more ambitious tools out there, and by all means, we need those tools. That’s how we advance the state of crypto. But as an infrastructure company that markets effectively against every other crypto company, what we’re building is extremely obvious and valuable to our customers,” Li told TechCrunch in an interview.

Li met his co-founder while they were both working in data engineering roles at digital insights company Heap Analytics. Li’s next jobs at Google and Meta eventually led him to 0x Labs, where he helped build a decentralized exchange aggregator called Motion, which he described as “Expedia, but for trading tokens.”

While Li saw what he described as staggering volumes on the platform, he noted that the main bottleneck for further growth was not actually around the engineering process.

“It was more about how we can get the data we need to send these features, because we can make the prettiest [product] in the world, but if it doesn’t actually represent real data, no one is going to use it,” Li said.

Li began building Goldsky to address the expensive challenge for web3 companies that comes with reading and processing data from deployed smart contracts. By automating the creation of data pipelines, Goldsky enables customers to spend more time building their core products instead of analyzing the data that feeds into those products, Li explained.

Companies, especially startups, lack the time or expertise to figure out how to analyze data on the supply chain, which is a fairly specialized skill, he added. While there are other startups like The Graph working to solve similar problems, Li said Goldsky’s differentiation lies in part in its focus on providing accurate, real-time data to companies.

“If you just look at the rest of the spectrum of other companies in this space, you’ll see that there are quite a few companies that build APIs. There are quite a few companies that allow people to query SQL databases,” Li said. “I think both of those are very valuable and you need both to build a successful business, but they’re only a small part of the bigger data challenges that every other company has, and I think real-time data in particular is actually very hard to get right. »

Li noted that Goldsky, founded last October, was one of the earliest companies to invest heavily in real-time data. He shared an example to illustrate why delivering real-time data in crypto is so challenging:

“What’s interesting about crypto is that it’s actually kind of a settlement phase. If you’re very close to the head of the chain, it actually takes time for some of these transactions to be confirmed, so your data isn’t actually truly immutable while transactions are being confirmed,” Li said.

The company is currently focused on serving crypto-native companies such as DeFi protocols, although Li declined to share numbers on how many customers Goldsky has or its revenue/profitability. He shared examples of some of the company’s current clients, including fellow crypto infrastructure firm Arweave and NFT company POAP.

The team consists of eight people today, all of whom are engineers working remotely (half are located in Canada, according to Li). While Li plans to use the fresh funding to add some new employees in areas such as product management and design, he said he wants to keep the team around 15 total employees for now to ensure Goldsky hires the right people.

Sundeep Peechu, a general partner at Felicis, led the venture firm’s investment in Goldsky. Peechu said he sees Goldsky’s biggest competition coming from companies trying to build their own data infrastructure in-house rather than from other startups in the space.

“When we did our due diligence, we talked to a bunch of companies and we asked them what they were using. “Almost everyone was building something in-house, so it’s just such a nascent market,” Peechu said.