Main Highlights:
- Tenderly, a company that aims to simplify the process of developing blockchain products for web3 developers “of all skill levels,” has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding only months after closing its Series A.
- The financing is another example of the rapid succession of funding rounds in the blockchain infrastructure market — and, more broadly, in the fintech field.
- Alchemy provides nodes as a service, whereas Tenderly provides a dashboard and API for designing, testing, and monitoring the health of decentralized apps.
Tenderly, a business that seeks to make building blockchain products easier for web3 developers “of all skill levels,” has acquired $40 million in a Series B round of investment only months after closing on its Series A.
The financing is another illustration of the quick succession of funding rounds in the blockchain infrastructure area — and in the fintech space more broadly. TechCrunch also reported earlier this month that Alchemy had raised a $200 million expansion to its Series C round at a valuation of $10.2 billion. That firm intends to serve as a jumping-off point for developers interested in developing products on top of a blockchain or in popular blockchain applications.
While both companies provide developer tools for developing decentralized applications, Alchemy provides node as a service, while Tenderly provides a platform for developing, testing, and monitoring the health of decentralized applications via its dashboard and API, the company maintains. According to the company, it is more focused on smart contracts.
Tenderly is used by “tens of thousands” of developers from programs such as Uniswap, Yearn Finance, Circle, Chainlink, Gnosis, Nexus Mutual, Instadapp, DeFi Saver, and OpenSea’s NFT marketplace (including decacorn). Indeed, according to the business, it collaborates with most of the top 100 Ethereum projects.
Based in Belgrade, Serbia, Tenderly was formed in 2018 by friends Andrej Bencic (CEO), Bogdan Habic (CTO), Miljan Tekic (COO), and Nebojsa Urosevic (Blockchain Architect) after years of working on the cutting edge of software development and being irritated by what they said were non-existent tools. The quartet asserts that they recognized early on the incredible potential for blockchain to become the internet’s next core standard and that for that to happen, the technology needed to be accessible to all.
Bencic explained that they founded Tenderly as four hyper-focused engineers on a single technology: blockchain and Ethereum. The group first developed the tools for their use — initially for debugging — but Tenderly has grown into a developer platform capable of processing over 25 million transactions per day through its virtual machine (VM). It currently encompasses many blockchain technologies, including Ethereum, Avalanche, Fantom, Optimism, and Arbitrum.
Bencic stated that they worked together with the entire community to design tools, services, and infrastructure systems that enable developers to rapidly-produce better products. They’re now assisting developers at every stage of development — from developing intelligent contracts to testing them in advance of production, assisting them with supporting infrastructure, and even helping them in production.
While the company declined to disclose specific revenue figures, it has seen a 500 percent increase in revenue and a 420 percent increase in users year over year, despite a lack of “proper expertise in the sales department,” according to Bencic, who attributes Tenderly’s success thus far to a “deep connection” with its user base.
He added that they’re essentially a product and engineering team still, but they plan to address that in the future year. The present volatility in the cryptocurrency market, he asserts, has did not affect its growth. Bencic said that they are witnessing a greater willingness on the part of developers to investigate the web3 sector in general.
Spark Capital’s investment in Tenderly:
Spark Capital led the startup’s most recent investment, which included establishing a San Francisco office. Accel (which led the company’s Series A round) and Point Nine Capital (which led the company’s seed round) participated, as did Abstract Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Uniswap, Daedalus, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, Optimism co-founder and CEO Jinglan Wang, Eric Ries, founder of Long-Term Stock Exchange, and Tihomir Bajic, CEO of LTSE Software.
The firm intends to utilize the extra money to continue expanding its product offerings, as well as to expand its client base and collaborations, as well as to hire technical and sales expertise.
Yasmin Razavi, the general partner at Spark Capital and the lead on the financing, believes the Tenderly suite of products will significantly lower the barrier to entry for web3 development and will increasingly empower developers throughout the entire building journey: from testing to deployment to monitoring.
