08.06.2021
Since 2018, Messari’s mission has been to provide the crypto ecosystem with the most reliable data and research services. Through our Pro and Enterprise suites, in-depth asset profiles, research reports, and live events, our team has worked tirelessly to help professionals and their firms participate more confidently in the expansive, ever-evolving crypto ecosystem. We are excited to further expand our offerings with the closing of a $21 million Series A, led by Point72 Ventures.
As we begin the next chapter of Messari’s story, we welcome Point72 Ventures as our lead investor and Operating Partner Adam Carson to our board of directors. We’re thrilled to have added some tremendous strategic partners to the new syndicate as well, including affiliates of nearly all of the major crypto exchanges and custodians: Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Capital, Blockchain Ventures, Galaxy Digital, Gemini Frontier Fund, Kraken Ventures, and Anchorage’s Diogo Monica; along with several of top crypto funds who have been critical in strategizing our roadmap: CMS Holdings, Nascent, and Underscore VC.
This funding marks a significant milestone for our company. It’s a recognition of our customer traction, team strength, and value creation to date. That said, I prefer to view financing events as opportunities versus merit badges! More than anything, this news means we get to triple down on products that organize and contextualize crypto data for our global users and fulfill our mission to power smarter participation in the booming crypto economy.
We’ll be sharing a lot more about our long-term vision for Messari at Mainnet 2021 this September 20-22 in NYC. The event is shaping up to be the event of the fall, and a good rally point for our Enterprise customers and ecosystem partners.
In the meantime, I wanted to take some time to explain what this round means for our various stakeholders.
Messari’s Series A and Our Stakeholders
Individual (Pro) Subscribers
The core of our business is our market intelligence platform, which combines curated news and analysis (our daily brief), in-depth market research (our full library), and a full suite of diligence tools for crypto investors (our charts, screeners, in-depth profiles, etc.) We’re scaling our analyst contributor base rapidly, and we’re tripling the size of our product and engineering teams in the next several quarters to enhance our Messari Pro offering.
Expect more sophisticated on-chain analytics, third-party data integrations, sector comparison tools, portfolio monitoring, and data viz dashboards. Today, the majority of our audience and subscriber base is located in the West (the US especially). As we look to expand our geographic reach, we’ll be adding more features that support our global audience, including foreign language translation and foreign currency support.
(We are hiring! Check out our available product and engineering roles. Apply today if you want to help build crypto’s top data portal.)
Enterprise Customers
With Messari Enterprise, we’ve built the crypto equivalent of a corporate actions alerts and monitoring service. Hundreds of top investors, exchanges, and token projects already rely on the Enterprise “Intel” product to monitor critical network developments for 200+ assets. In the months ahead, we plan to expand Intel’s asset coverage to hundreds of new protocols and extend deeper diligence services to institutional entrants who are diving beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Our Messari Asset Coverage Support (“MACS”) product helps product managers and compliance teams simplify onboarding, integration, and support processes for the crypto assets they wish to add to their platforms. We expect our strategic investors to be invaluable early testers and collaborators on future Enterprise products as well.
(You can trial Messari Enterprise for free! Contact our team to learn more about more in-depth research engagements.)
Token Projects / DAO Customers
We started Messari with a from-first-principles design goal of architecting a universally accessible “crypto EDGAR” database. Over the past several years, we’ve built many of the components of the data library we envisioned. The result has been our globally distributed analyst community and best-in-class asset profiles, which will increasingly mirror real-time financial filings as we grow. These include in-depth information on the histories, teams, token economics, security models, governance events, and on-chain KPIs for thousands of projects.
Our in-depth analysis has been made possible thanks to the relationships we have forged with 100+ top projects through our Messari Hub program. With these memberships, we have been able to subsidize our analyst’s ongoing coverage of each project and pay for increasingly bespoke community services including investor relations, token economic modeling, treasury risk management, and more. We aim to expand these relationships even further in order to provide the ecosystem with a leading DAO services firm in the decade ahead.
Hub Analysts
Along with our robust crypto data ingestion engine and suite of analytics tools, our marketplace of Hub analysts has been a pillar of our business since day one. The majority of our full-time research analysts (not to mention dozens of analysts working full-time at other top crypto companies) started as “community” analysts long before we launched our Hub this summer. It would be impossible to keep up with crypto without talented, passionate analysts with a demonstrated ability to curate and synthesize crypto data for actionable insights. The space evolves so quickly, that it is (and will be for quite some time) impossible to replace human analysts with fully automated solutions.
This round of funding will help us hit our goal of onboarding 1,000+ analysts to the Messari Hub in order to serve as asset profile authors, sector research contributors, token economic modelers, on-chain data scientists, and more. DAOs have massive treasuries to spend, and few ways to effectively source human capital to deliver well-scoped deliverables for their communities. Our Hub analysts will be some of the most prolific early contributors to the emerging crypto projects that engage Messari for analytics coverage.
(Want to break into crypto full-time or leave your soul-sucking investment-banking job? Join the Hub analyst community.)
The Present and Future of our Team
If you haven’t been able to pick up on it by now, the biggest thing that will change with this financing is our team size. Our growth this year has been constrained only by our ability to hire top talent. We’re hiring BD, Sales, and Marketing talent to help us professionalize our customer funnel and onboard backlogged customers. We’re hiring Finance, Legal, and Ops talent to help us build our token treasury infrastructure, our HR functions, and to help triage analyst resources across our network. And of course, we’re hiring world-class research analysts, product managers, and data engineers (see above).
(Check out our careers page to see all of the open positions, and learn more about what it’s like to work at Messari.)
Speaking of the team, some shout-outs are in order. I want to thank Eric Turner (VP, Market Intelligence), Diran Li (VP, Engineering), and Ben O’Neill (VP, BD & Ops) for betting on Messari back in 2018 and working tirelessly with me to turn a half-baked idea four years ago into a successful, fast-growing business with enormous growth prospects.
I also want to thank Florent Moulin (Director of Product) for showing how rapidly a hard-working volunteer analyst -> intern -> full-time analyst -> product associate -> product lead can scale with the right mix of smarts and crypto obsession, and for telling me our “professionally designed” v1 pitch deck was trash, and re-designing the winning deck over a single 100+ hour week.
And I want to thank Emily Coleman (Director of Marketing) and Maartje Bus (GM of our Analyst Hub) for setting a high standard for how quickly new senior team members integrate with our team and drive growth. These six are doing most of our hiring over the next year, so If you join us, you’ll have the good fortune of working with some of the best leaders in crypto, not to mention the rest of our incredible roster of colleagues. (I linked to their Twitter accounts. Follow them!)
Finally, thank you to Jeff Clavier from Uncork Capital, a “re-investor” in this round, who’s lived up to his reputation as one of tech’s best and most effective seed-stage investors and board members. Great investors know when and how to push an entrepreneur. I didn’t want to raise in Q1 (“we’re busy onboarding customers and shipping product!”), Jeff challenged me on that. He was right, I got into the VC game mindset in Q2, and we got it done.
We're happy to announce our $21M Series A Funding Round led by @p72vc.
A note from @twobitidiot on our latest news. https://t.co/ClPexxQnSz pic.twitter.com/dJXPCwPZ8j
— Messari (@MessariCrypto) August 5, 2021
Source: Messari
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