Nomics raises $3m in Series A round as demand for crypto data surges

Nomics, an API crypto data site, announced Tuesday that it had closed a Series A round at $3M. The leading investor was VC firm Arthur Ventures, which was joined by BitGo co-Founder Ben Davenport, CityBlock Capital, Coinbase Ventures, CoVenture Crypto and Digital Currency Group.

Founded earlier this year, Nomics has indexed 3.5 billion raw trading data-points from multiple exchanges, aiming to guide investment decisions and machine-learning models. 80% of its paying customers consist of hedge funds with a heavy quant strategy, while the remaining 20% is shared between exchanges and fintech apps, the company said. It would not confirm the total number of customers to date.

"I think the space is really wising up. After the irrationality of 2017, people are demanding clean, hard guidelines," Clay Collins, Nomics' CEO, told The Block.  He added that raising funds in a bear market had been surprisingly straightforward. "We have a strong balance sheet and a real product and customers. It's not a bet on asset prices. I think this [investor interest] represents a real desire to have equity - meaning information rights, voting rights etc - and to invest in real businesses with people with experience at their helm."

The bulk of the raised funds will go to R&D (including engineer hires) to "scale the ingestion of data," with the company hoping to index 95% of all transaction data available. Collins added that he did not anticipate having to raise again and expects to be profitable "way before we run out of money."

Investors will be hoping the company can provide the space with the data infrastructure needed to provide consistency and scalability.