One of Ethereum’s most popular data visualization and analytics platform is gearing up for expansion with a massive fundraising round.
On Wednesday, Dune Analytics announced the close of a $69,420,000 round at a $1 billion valuation. (The meme-flavored sum follows crypto exchange FTX raising $420,690,000 last October.)
The round was led by Coatue, a venture behemoth that, until recently, hasn’t been active in the cryptocurrency space. However, according to Dune CEO Fredrik Haga, the investment firm – which has big bets on OpenSea, Alchemy and Dapper Labs – was aggressive in courting the platform.
“We had not made a single slide or Excel sheet – they simply came to us, had extreme conviction in what we were doing, and had done a lot of outside-in research, and gave us an offer we couldn’t refuse,” he said.
The Dune team is now plotting expansion with the goal of becoming “the only place you need to go for data in the space” – a potentially lucrative niche, given the inherent data-richness of blockchain technology.
“What we have here is a public backend where anyone in the world can deploy applications, and that creates data. And then with Dune, anyone in the world can analyze that data. That’s why the opportunity is big, and that’s why we’ve gone down the open route.”
Expansion plans
On the immediate roadmap is plans to expand to other blockchains, adding additional tooling such as API access, and the launch of a new data platform that will allow users to compare datasets across chains.
Haga envisions the company developing much in the mold of Github, a popular freemium software development platform.
“You take open access as the core and free product, and then you add on premium services for closed organizations on top of that,” he said.
Data platforms have been a particular target for venture capital funds as of late. In December, Nansen raised $75 million, and in January The Graph raised $50 million.
