By
Bena Ilyas
May 13th, 2024
According to reports, part of the money raised will be used for expanding the company’s engineering teams in Australia and the United States.
Web3 startup Spice AI has raised $13.5 million in a seed round led by Madrona Venture Group. According to reports, the round was participated by several investors including “Australian venture capital firm Blackbird Ventures, Basis Set Ventures, Founders’ Co-op, Alumni Ventures Blockchain Fund, Joe McCann’s new Asymmetric fund, Picus Capital and Protocol Lab.” This is in addition to the participation of “Angel investors including Shane Mac, the co-founder of XMTP, and Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub. ”
Spice AI is known for its role in building technologies to enable developers to create the future of intelligent applications. It was founded in 2021 by Luke Kim and Phillip LeBlanc who were formerly with Microsoft and GitHub.
On record, this seed round is Spice AI’s second fundraising since its establishment. In October 2021, the company raised $1.1 million pre-seed. According to reports, part of the money raised will go into adding up to its engineering team in Australia and the United States. Kim also disclosed that the company has been working on data products since the beginning of the year, and a preview was launched in April.
Giving a brief explanation of its operation, Kim mentioned that obtaining data in a well-structured and easy-to-understand format has been nearly impossible in the past 10 years. His company is, therefore, set up to allow developers to get access to data from crypto projects like Sushiswap and Uniswap. Also, Bitcoin and Ethereum have been completely indexed for now with polygon set to be launched in the next few weeks. Solana launch is equally in the pipeline.
“We need the next layer of infrastructure to start building data-driven applications on it that bridge between L-1s and the actual application,” said Kim. “Spice AI is building a developer-first platform to create Artificial Intelligence [and] Machine Learning-driven applications that harness time series data – a valuable yet difficult to harness data set for any organization,” he added.
Aseem Datar, partner at venture capital group Madrona and an investor of the pre-seed stated that Spice AI has been very impressive with the pace of innovation and its focus on building infrastructures for web3. Tim Porter, managing director at Madrona, also added that there is an opportunity for the startup to come up with “a developer-first framework and intelligent data-sets” that create blockchain data insight as well as give developers a chance to build “intelligent distributed Web3 applications.”