Quick take:
- The platform is available in Preview with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ethereum Name Service (ENS) datasets.
- It is working on adding indexes for Solana and Polygon.
- The platform allows developers to access data from protocols like Sushiswap and Uniswap.
Spice AI, a platform that enables developers to build data-driven applications for Web3, has raised $13.5 million in a seed round led by Madrona. Additional backers include Australia-based Blackbird Ventures, Basis Set Ventures, Alumni Ventures Blockchain Fund, Joe McCann’s new Asymmetric fund, Protocol Labs, and IEX Fund.
Other strategic angel investors also participated in the round, including Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, who is also joining the board along with Tim Porter, managing director at Madrona.
The company explains that while most blockchains are public and open, extracting data from them to power apps and ML is painfully difficult. To get meaningful quantities of useful data, developers are forced to build and operate a massively complex infrastructure which includes blockchain nodes, big data systems, ETL and ML pipelines, data lakes, data warehouses, and query systems.
“Spice AI is building a developer-first platform to create AI/ML-driven applications that harness time series data – a valuable yet difficult to harness data set for any organization. There is no ecosystem out there that is more data-rich than Web3 and blockchains, but that area is currently hampered by lack of data access and infrastructure,” said Luke Kim, CEO of Spice AI.
Spice AI aims to solve the data accessibility problem in Web3 by providing infrastructure that allows developers to access Web3 data across chains via SQL over high-performance Apache Arrow APIs.
“Solving the data problem in Web3 requires deep domain knowledge and Spice AI is building the infrastructure, so developers do not have to deal with the complexity of building it themselves. Now is the time to build for Web3 and we are excited to be well capitalized to grow the team and address this gap in the market,” Kim added.
Founded in 2021, Spice AI is now available in preview with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ethereum Name Service (ENS) datasets and is working on adding Solana and Polygon. The platform also allows developers to access data from protocols like Sushiswap and Uniswap.
Before founding Spice AI, Kim was the founding manager and co-creator of Azure Incubations at Microsoft where he led cross-functional engineering teams to create and develop technologies like Dapr.
Co-founder Phillip LeBlanc has spent a decade building some of the largest distributed systems and big data platforms used by millions worldwide. Before co-founding Spice AI, LeBlanc was both an engineering manager and IC working on distributed systems at GitHub and Microsoft. He has contributed to services developers use every day including GitHub Actions, Azure Active Directory and Visual Studio App Center.
“Spice AI is building the foundational platform for Web3, so developers do not have to invest in standing up their own infrastructure and in data engineering that is complex and costly, and frankly, hard to get right. Delivering real-time insights from time-series data across chains powers intelligent applications being built for a wide range of industries – from addressing buying patterns in e-tail/retail all the way to fraud detection and securities trading,” added Aseem Datar, Partner at Madrona.
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