Ethereum data firm Dune Analytics, which has stood out from the pack for its focus on decentralized finance (DeFi) projects, has raised $2 million from a mix of seasoned crypto investors and DeFi angels.
Announced Wednesday, the seed round was led by Dragonfly Capital and included Multicoin Capital, Coinbase Ventures and Digital Currency Group (the owner of CoinDesk).
The list of angel investors in the round included the likes of Compound’s Calvin Liu, Matteo Leibowitz of Uniswap and Aave founder Stani Kulechov. Yearn creator Andre Cronje, who also participated in the round via a non-dilutive grant, said for the record that “Dune has been a lifesaver.”
Fredrik Haga, Dune Analytics CEO and co-founder, said Cronje of Yearn didn't want a stake, but simply wanted to support the project. “That was pretty amazing,” Haga said. “I think that type of gratitude and support with no strings attached is amazing. I think you wouldn’t find that in any other industry.”
The Dune Analytics team, based in Oslo, Norway, attributed its success to being open and community-driven.
“It’s kind of like a GitHub-type of product where you have collaboration built-in, but it also has more of an end-to-end product experience where you can create charts and dashboards,” Haga said of his firm’s flagship offering. “We give people access to the whole dataset and they can build on each other and instantly share what they’re doing. I think that offers powerful insights and details into how these systems operate.”
Armed with the new funding, Dune will be making the service easier for users to interact with each other and lowering the bar a little to engage more with non-technical users.
“There’s so much low-hanging fruit that we can grab, it’s great to have the bandwidth to do it,” Haga said.
In addition, the two-man team of Haga and co-founder Mats Julian Olsen will be hiring more staffers across Europe to work remotely and help deal with the thousands of analytics calls being fielded and a 10% growth in visits to the website each week.
“It’s been quite crazy,” Haga said of DeFi’s accelerating insanity. “We try to catch enough sleep but otherwise it’s pretty much around the clock.”