Former Coinbase employees raise $4.5 million for web3 data startup Coherent: Exclusive

Coherent, a blockchain data startup co-founded by former Coinbase employees, has raised $4.5 million in a seed funding round.

The round was co-led by Kindred Ventures, Matchstick Ventures and Foundry Group, with Coinbase Ventures, Alchemy, Chapter One and Dan Romero, an early employee at Coinbase, participating, among other investors, Coherent told The Block.  

Carl Cortright and Ellen Choi, former Coinbase engineers, co-founded Coherent in April of this year. When asked why he left Coinbase, Cortright said in an interview that he wasn’t growing much as an engineer and wanted to build a platform for human-readable blockchain data to help bring the next billion users in crypto.

Coherent is working on APIs that will allow developers to build applications and offer new features using its data. The firm is focusing on three types of data — on-chain transaction history, non-fungible token (NFT) data and credentials — according to Cortright.

“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 to their API. We will allow you to connect to a wallet address and get all of the information about that address easily in a very digestible way,” said Cortright.

Coherent is not the only startup building APIs for blockchain data. Covalent and Moralis are two of its closest competitors, but Coherent has a specific focus on user data, said Cortright.

"A lot of similar startups are going really broad, like they're trying to build APIs for everything. We are very much narrowed down on identity and user data," said Cortright.

Coherent’s product is currently in a testing phase and is expected to launch in September.

There are currently five people working for Coherent and Cortright plans to hire two more engineers in the near future.

Updates to include Coherent's other co-founder Ellen Choi