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I’m excited to announce that Multicoin Capital has co-led a $3.5M investment in dfuse with Intel Capital, including participation from Diagram Ventures.
For developers coming from traditional backgrounds, building blockchain-based applications is foreign. Blockchain databases may confirm transactions in seconds, or may not confirm them at all. Reading from blockchain databases is difficult. Subscribing to updates is challenging. These databases don’t offer global search. Configuring test environments is laborious.
Deploying and maintaining blockchain nodes, interfacing with haphazard APIs, or relying on APIs provided without an SLA are some of the first challenges in front of any team looking to integrate with any blockchain.
Over the next few years, we expect the blockchain space to become much more heterogeneous as the number of and types of blockchains grows. As new developers enter the blockchain space, they quickly become overwhelmed both by the types of new technical considerations (like latency), and the number of technical options they must consider. This frequently creates analysis paralysis, and leads to suboptimal decisions because developers don’t have the time to explore the nuances of each of the major platforms.
dfuse aims to be the blockchain API company across all chains, abstracting all chain-specific complexity.
dfuse has been quietly iterating and building for about a year now. They’ve shipped a suite of products - Stream, Lifecycle, Search, Workers, and On Demand Networks.
The company launched on EOS shortly after EOS’s mainnet launch. They’ll be launching support for Ethereum in the next few weeks, and with this funding, will accelerate the pace at which they add support for new chains.
In October of 2017, I attended ETH Waterloo. The hackathon organizers organized a bus to help attendees get to the airport as the event ended. I sat next to Richard Reiner, a serial entrepreneur who helped cofound dfuse just a few months later. In the following months, Richard connected me with his cofounder Marc-Antoine Ross, CEO. Co-founders Richard, Marc, Alex, and Mathieu have built many companies together over the years with multiple exits. In our early discussions, it became clear that this team saw the opportunity to build the defining API company of the Web3 era.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Marc and the dfuse team for the last few months, and they have been nothing short of exceptional on all fronts. They have a deep, pragmatic understanding of what developers want, a unique mix of hands-on experience and the ability to rapidly iterate with early adopters, and are among the most humble builders I’ve met in crypto. I joke with Marc that their biggest problem is that they’re too humble. :)
Marc has assembled a fantastic team of technologists, big data engineers, security leaders, and devops experts in Montreal. They’re shipping every week, and have built a rabid community. In due diligence, customer feedback was nothing short of glowing.
The crypto community is global, and Marc recognized this early and began operationalizing the company to support Mandarin. Most North American teams are too US-centric, and ignore more than 50% of the developers and capital in crypto that’s based in Asia. Marc recognized that having too much of a Western bias would limit the company. He is precisely the kind of entrepreneur we aim to back: one that recognizes the unique aspects of crypto and resolves to capitalize on unique opportunities, even when they present logistical challenges.
I’m incredibly grateful for the chance to back Marc, Richard, Alex, Mathieu, and the rest of the dfuse team. 99% of the 40M developers in the world haven’t yet experienced the pains and pleasures of building blockchain-based applications. Using dfuse, they’ll only experience the latter.
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