DeFi-native crypto tracer Nansen raised $12m in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
Other investors include Skyfall Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, imToken Ventures, Mechanism Capital and QCP Capital. In addition to individual investors, Ethereum developer Eric Conner, Kevin Hu of Dragonfly Capital, FTX’s Anthony Yoon and Deribit’s Sergei Chan also joined in this round.
The funding will go toward improving its data platform, expanding the service to more blockchains and layer 2 solutions, including Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum and others. Nansen will also use the money to grow the community of crypto investors and traders and hire new talent, it said.
Nansen was launched in April as a subscription-based product and currently focuses on Ethereum data. Nansen focuses on analysing billions of on-chain data points, millions of wallet labels and thousands of entities on Ethereum to help investors and financial institutions make informed decisions on project discovery, due diligence and trading.
Nansen’s existing client base is in the blockchain and crypto space like Polychain, Three Arrows, Pantera, and Defiance Capital, as well as professional investors, such as hedge funds, trading desks, and market makers, crypto teams such as protocol developers, including MakerDAO and Synthetix and individual crypto investors. Nansen currently has more than 1,000 trial customers and more than 200 subscribers.
Nansen CEO Alex Svanevik said, “The capital raised in this round will allow us to level up our competitive intelligence, as we become the #1 blockchain analytics platform and help make the future of finance a reality.”
As the open global financial markets grow, traders and collectors of all kinds, from retail novices to institutional professionals and more, will want to understand what the “smart money” is doing across blockchains, said a16z general partner Chris Dixon.
Dixon added, “We’re thrilled to support them as they build DeFi-native analytics products that offer insights for a new generation of investors at an important moment for crypto.”
Andreessen Horowitz’s investment comes from a $510m Crypto Fund II set up in 2020. It also launched a $2.2bn crypto fund more recently which will be invested in crypto networks and the founders and teams currently being built within the digital assets space.
Earlier this month, cryptocurrency startup Solana Labs announced it has raised over $314m of new funding in a private token sale led by a16z and Polychain Capital.
Tracking crypto as it flows from wallets to exchanges and other platforms has become an important sub-industry within the digital-asset space, with major funding rounds for Chainalysis, CipherTrace and TRM Labs in recent weeks.
In general, crypto companies have been focal investments for venture capitals looking to expand their portfolios this year. Venture capital firms have already put over $17.2bn into crypto companies in the first half of 2021, up 212.7% from $5.5bn in the entirety of 2020, according to data from PitchBook.
