Cryptocurrency startup Alchemy is now valued at $10.2 billion, the company said Tuesday (Feb. 8), after a $200 million fundraising round led by Lightspeed and Silver Lake and including earlier investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue and Pantera, according to a CNBC report.
Alchemy was valued at $3.5 billion after its previous financing round in October, the report said, meaning the company’s valued has almost tripled in less than four months. Overall blockchain funding jumped more than 700% in 2021, topping $25.5 billion, according to a CB Insights report.
“Everyone’s looking for a way to get involved in the space, and what they realized was Alchemy is the backbone for all of these things,” Alchemy co-founder and chief technology officer Joe Lau told CNBC in an interview. “We still think this is the first inning of Web3.”
Web3 refers to blockchain-based applications, including crypto and nonfungible tokens (NFTs), with proponents calling it a more decentralized version of the internet. Skeptics of the Web3 movement include Tesla’s Elon Musk and Block’s Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter.
Developers use Alchemy’s platform to build applications on top of blockchains, such as Ethereum. It was used to build NBA Top Shot, video game Axie Infinity and NFT marketplace OpenSea. Adobe is working with Alchemy on offering NFTs through a Photoshop feature, the report says.
“There’s a bunch of people who have been trying to do this over the years, and it’s a really difficult technology problem to solve,” Alchemy co-founder and CEO Nikil Viswanathan told CNBC. “We welcome more people coming into the space because it helps expand the whole market.”
Related: Nium Helps Crypto-Fiat Gateway Alchemy Expand
Last month, Alchemy Pay and Singapore-based payments and card-issuance provider Nium announced their collaboration, saying it “represents major progress for Alchemy Pay,” which now gets to pay out funds to clients at much lower costs in more than 190 countries.
Alchemy Pay runs on the Ethereum blockchain and is known for its hybrid crypto-fiat payment platform, which lets merchants accept cryptocurrencies in online and offline payments “with near-instant instant conversion to the merchant’s local fiat currency.”