Web3 Startup SpiceAI Cooks Up $13.5M Raise To Make Data More Accessible

SpiceAI, a Web3 startup that is creating technologies for developers to build the future of intelligent applications, closed a $13.5 million seed round led by Madrona Venture Group.

Other investors who have also bid on the startup’s success include prominent 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. Angel investors participating in the round include Shane Mac, the co-founder of XMTP, and Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub.  

SpiceAI was founded in June 2021 by Microsoft and GitHub alumni Luke Kim and Phillip LeBlanc. The pair wanted to create better user experiences for Web3 applications in the infrastructure and tooling space.

In an exclusive interview with Blockworks, Kim said that over the past ten years, there hadn’t been a way to obtain data in a well-structured, easy-to-understand format. 

As it currently stands, the SpiceAI platform is a query interface integrated with GitHub that allows developers to access data from protocols such as Sushiswap and Uniswap. 

“We need the next layer of infrastructure to actually start building data-driven applications on it that bridges between L-1s and the actual application,” Kim said.

“SpiceAI 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.”

Kim said the team has been working on its data product since January this year and launched a preview of the product in April. SpiceAI currently has Bitcoin and Ethereum fully indexed — it plans to launch Polygon in the next few weeks and Solana in the near future. 

SpiceAI previously raised a $1.1 million pre-seed in October last year. Its latest seed funding will be the startup’s second fundraise since its genesis and will allow SpiceAI to grow its engineering teams in Australia and the United States.

Aseem Datar, partner at venture capital group Madrona, which invested in the company’s pre-seed, said in a statement that SpiceAI “continues to impress us with the focus and pace of innovation as they build this infrastructure for Web3,” by “delivering real-time insights from time-series data across chains.”

The latest fundraising will be bringing Tim Porter, managing director at Madrona, onto the SpiceAI board along with GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke.

“We see a massive opportunity for Spice AI to provide a developer-first framework and intelligent data sets that unlock insights in blockchain data and enable developers to create intelligent distributed Web3 applications,” Porter said in a statement.

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