[Tampa, Jan 5, 2022] BlockSpaces, a blockchain business integration platform, announced it has closed $5.75M in an oversubscribed venture seed round to help companies connect to blockchains. The round was led by returning San Francisco-based investor Leadout Capital with participation from QED’s Seed Fund, Bolt, GTMfund, Tampa-based Druid Ventures, and renowned tech investor, Mark Pincus, founder of mobile social gaming company, Zynga. They are joined by early insiders Brighter Capital, BlockFund Ventures and Tampa tech entrepreneur, Tony DiBenedetto. As part of the funding round, Steve Brownlie, General Partner at Leadout Capital, will join BlockSpaces Board of Directors.
“We are excited to continue to support the BlockSpaces team in building an infrastructure platform that will expand business access to blockchain based [innovation],” said Leadout General Partner Steve Brownlie. He added, “We believe their offering will unlock the value of blockchain projects deployed by businesses of all sizes with ease of participation in the rapid adoption and expansion of multiple use cases including decentralized finance (DeFi) and non fungible tokens (NFT).”
Led by Rosa Shores, Cofounder/CEO, BlockSpaces provides a platform that eliminates steep barriers for businesses by allowing the easy integration of enterprise applications and blockchain networks while hiding the complexities associated with managing blockchain in a business environment. The solution allows innovative companies and developers greater accessibility to both public and private blockchains by combining no/low code, drag-and-drop workflows, robust performance analytics, and managed blockchain infrastructure which further offers the ability to stake, scale, and deploy nodes with enterprise-grade security and monitoring.
“There’s a lot of excitement around Web3 right now, but there’s still a lot of work to be done,” said Scott Barker, Venture Partner, GTMfund. “We believe organizations like BlockSpaces that can facilitate a bridge between the “old world” and the new will have a huge impact on shaping the technology landscape over the next 5-10 years.”
Founded in 2017 by Shores and cofounder, Gabe Higgins, BlockSpaces’ managed blockchain offering achieved major milestones in 2021 in terms of hyper-growth customer acquisition and market penetration, culminating in a 40x increase in revenue, 20x increase in customers, 30x increase in total node count, and a 7x increase in team members. BlockSpaces now has a global presence of multi-cloud and bare metal supported infrastructure across 3 continents, supporting 17 cutting edge public blockchain networks with best in class reliability and connectivity speed for customers enabling over $55M to be staked. Currently supported public chains include Avalanche Mainnet, BSC Mainnet, Bitcoin, Cardano Mainnet, Eth Mainnet, Eth Kovan, Eth Ropsten, Eth Goerli, Eth Archive, Eth Trace, Fuse Mainnet, Harmony Shard 0, Pocket Mainnet, Polygon Mainnet, Polygon Archival, Solana Mainnet and xDai A, in addition to Trust Your Supplier, a supplier credentialing network and Indecio, a self-sovereign ID protocol, with dozens more slated to be supported soon.
This is the company’s second financing announcement since their initial $1.25M seed round in March 2021, which brings BlockSpaces’ total amount raised to just over $7.25M. According to Crunchbase, this places BlockSpaces amongst the top ten female co-founded and led blockchain companies in the US.
“2021 was a pivotal year for BlockSpaces and we are pleased to have such incredible partners join us in our mission to make blockchain useful for business,” said Shores. “This latest infusion of capital will ensure that we continue to build world class blockchain connectivity and infrastructure for enterprises. We are committed to a future where developing and integrating blockchain and distributed ledger technologies is easier, and our platform is the connector from Web 2.0 systems to Web 3.0 networks.”
The company intends to use the new funds to expand operational capacity, aggressively hire top talent, increase infrastructure support in major regions, and expand its availability of new blockchains. “With the rapid growth we’re experiencing, we’ve been well-positioned to attract highly qualified and experienced team members who can handle the technical dynamics involved,” said Higgins, cofounder, Chief Blockchain Officer. “As we launch our expanded platform this year, we’ll be working closely with our strategic partners while continuing to expand our team to support the most sophisticated integration product in the market. We’re confident that it will be a game changer in making any blockchain easy and cost effective for any business to use.”
About BlockSpaces: BlockSpaces believes in a future where every business will transact with more trust, transparency and security. Our mission is to blockchain-enable traditional business applications to leverage the unique features and benefits that an interconnected blockchain world provides. Through our enterprise-focused integration platform, we manage blockchain API connections, data flow and configurations, so our customers can plug-and-play into any existing system. BlockSpaces is simplifying the blockchain integration experience for all business applications and use cases.
About Leadout Capital: Leadout Capital is an early stage venture capital firm with a founder market fit-driven thesis backs “non-obvious”, resilient founders with deep customer insights, who pursue software driven solutions to an unmet customer need in large end markets. We support them with world-class network access and experience-based advice and work to unlock the tremendous value inherent in diversity in order to expand the size of the market of new ideas and products in the startup ecosystem.