Dune Analytics reaches $1 billion valuation after $69 million funding round

Dune Analytics, one of Ethereum’s most popular data visualization and analytics platforms, propelled to Unicorn Status with a $1 billion valuation after a $69 million fundraising round, looking to expand cross-chain.

On February 2, Dune Analytics announced the close of a $69,420,000 round at a $1 billion valuation.

The round was led by Coatue, a venture giant that, until recently, hasn’t been active in the cryptocurrency space. However, according to Dune CEO Fredrik Haga, the investment firm – which has big bets on OpenSea, Alchemy, and Dapper Labs – was aggressive in courting the platform. The round also saw existing investors like Dragonfly Capital and Multicoin Capital participation.

“We had not made a single slide or Excel sheet – they simply came to us, had extreme conviction in what we were doing, and had done a lot of outside-in research, and gave us an offer we couldn’t refuse,” he said.

The first and foremost big plan is to build a super community of 1 million analysts, also called Dune Wizards. The firm wants to offer these analysts, currently 10,000 in number, a vast pool of blockchain data that they can use to add value to the crypto community while also finding similar jobs.

Besides the community building part, Dune also wants to support more blockchains such as Solana and Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVM) chains, etc., in addition to the existing platforms like Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, and so on. Creating the ‘in-demand’ API is next on its to-do list, which will allow “boundary-less research, building, tinkering, trading, and beyond.”

“What we have here is a public back end where anyone in the world can deploy applications, and that creates data,” Haga noted. “And then with Dune, anyone in the world can analyze that data. That’s why the opportunity is big, and that’s why we’ve gone down the open route.”

Haga envisions the company developing much in the mold of Github, a popular freemium software development platform.

“You take open access as the core and free product, and then you add on premium services for closed organizations on top of that,” he said.

Dune Analytics is an Oslo-based Ethereum-centric and community-driven analytics platform. It offers free and paid tools to create, explore and share crypto-based analytics in the form of dashboards and data charts using SQL queries.

With just 16 employees, the company plans to use the funds to hire more staff and invest in educational resources to teach blockchain data interpretation to the commoner.

Dune Analytics is the perfect platform to provide key metrics for DeFi, NFTs and more for crypto enthusiasts or professionals who need data analysis tools. With the new financing, the company will educate, reward, and empower a new generation of web3 data analysts, like Dune Wizards, to make crypto data wider accessible.

Before this, Dune Analytics’ Series A round raised a mere $8 million last July.