One of Ethereum's most popular data visualization and analysis platforms is getting ready to thrive with a massive fundraiser.
On Wednesday, Dune Analytics notified the closing of a round of €69,420,000 with a valuation of €1,000 million. (The meme-flavored sum follows crypto exchange FTX, which raised €420,690,000 in the month of October.)
The round was led by Coatue, a corporate giant that has not been active in the cryptocurrency space until recently. However, according to Dune CEO Fredrik Haga, the investment firm, which has big bets on OpenSea, Alchemy and Dapper Labs, has been violent in seducing the platform.
"We hadn't done a single slide or excel sheet, they just came to us, had extreme faith in what we were doing and had done a lot of outside research, and they made us an offer we couldn't refuse," he said.
The Dune team is now planning an expansion with the aim of becoming "the one place to go for data in space," a potentially profitable niche, given the inherent richness of data in blockchain technology.
"What we have here is a public backend where anyone on the planet can embed apps and that creates data. And then with Dune, anyone on the planet can examine that data. Hence the timing is great and hence that we walk the open road.
Expansion Plans
On the immediate roadmap, there are plans to expand to other blockchains, adding ancillary tools like API access and launching a new data platform that will let users collate cross-chain datasets.
Haga envisions the company largely following the mold of Github, a popular freemium software development platform.
"Take open access as a basic free product, and then add premium services for closed organizations on top of that," he said.
Data platforms have been a particular target for venture capital funds recently. In the last month of the year Nansen collected €75 million and in the first month of the year The Graph collected €50 million.