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Coherenta blockchain data startup founded by former Coinbase employee Carl Cortright, has raised $4.5 million in a seed funding round.
The round was co-hosted by Kindred Ventures, Matchstick Ventures, and Foundry Group, as well as Coinbase Ventures, Alchemy, Chapter One, and one of the first Coinbase employees, Dan Romero, among other investors, Coherent told Coherent.
Courtright founded Coherent in April this year after leaving Coinbase, where he spent almost four years as a senior software engineer and member of its venture capital division. When asked why he left, Cortright said in an interview that he hadn’t grown much as an engineer and wanted to build a human-readable blockchain data platform to help bring the next billion users into crypto.
Coherent is working on APIs that will allow developers to create applications and offer new features using their data. According to Cortright, the firm focuses on three types of data — network transaction history, non-fungible token (NFT) data, and credentials.
“We will be like Plaid for crypto. Like how Plaid allows you to connect a bank account and then get all the transactions from that bank account in their API. We will allow you to connect to a wallet address and easily get all the information about that address in a very convenient way,” Cortright said.
Coherent is not the only startup creating an API for blockchain data. Covalent and Moralis are two of its closest competitors, but Coherent has a strong focus on user data, Cortright said.
“A lot of startups like this go very broad, like they’re trying to build an API for everything. We’ve narrowed it down a lot to identity data and user data,” Cortright said.
The Coherent product is currently in testing and is expected to be launched in September.
Coherent currently employs five people and Cortright plans to hire two more engineers in the near future.
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