Dune Analytics, a leading data analytics platform, has announced a capital raise of $69,420,000, in addition to a $1 billion-dollar valuation, the latter of which means that the company attained "unicorn" status, which describes privately-held startups that have attained a valuation of $1 billion or more.
The Series B raise was led by New-York based private equity firm Coatue, with additional participation from previous investors Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital, among others.
The raise succeeds the company’s seed funding round of $2 million in September 2020 — of which Dragonfly Capital Partners was the lead investor — and its follow-up Series A raise of $8 million in August 2021 led by Union Square Ventures.
According to the announcement, the capital will be utilized to “educate, reward, and foster a new generation of analysts, who will be empowered with real-time, actionable insights into web3 data.”
Dune Analytics is highly-regarded throughout the space for providing real-time, on-chain quantitative metrics, graphics and charts on the crypto, blockchain, decentralized finance (DeFi), and more recently, nonfungible token (NFT) markets. As of now, the platform publishes blockchain data from Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, Binance Smart Chain and xDAI.
Blockchains generate an *ocean* of data
As more and more value moves to crypto...
Extracting insight from it presents historic opportunities many times greater than siloed, paywalled data platforms of the TradFi past
The revolution will not be reported quarterly
— Dune Analytics (@DuneAnalytics) February 2, 2022Related: Decentralized exchange aggregator trading volumes surge to new highs
In a new initiative to promote Web3, Dune is seeking to expand its existing community of 10,000 contributing analysts up to a figure of 1 million through the construction of a community-centric architecture that incentives contribution on the platform.
Referred to as Dune Wizards, this community of analysts will be responsible for creating compelling content in the pursuit of decentralizing knowledge, and in turn, empowering investors to make insightful, data-backed decisions. This marks an evolution of the walled-garden traditional financial market model in which Wall Street investors were granted informational advantages over their retail counterparts.
Dune co-founder and CTO Mats Olsen pledged the company's intentions to build a community-centric model in the Web3 landscape:
“Dune will provide the necessary tools so that users of all skill levels will be able to conduct more thoughtful, impactful analysis and gain deeper insight into the ever-evolving world of web3."
