Ethereum analytics platform Dune raises $2 million in seed funding

Dune Analytics, the community-driven analytics platform that provides data tools for the Ethereum network, has raised $2 million in a seed funding round.

Dragonfly Capital led the round, with participation from Multicoin Capital, Hashed, Semantic Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Coingecko, Alameda Research and Digital Currency Group. The funding round also drew a range of angel investors from around the digital asset ecosystem, including protocol founders like Aave’s Stanislav Kulechov, Aragon’s Luis Cuende and Gnosis’s Stefan George, among others.

In an interview, Dune co-founder Fredrik Haga traced the startup’s history back to experiments between him and co-founder Mats Julian Olsen during their time together at a Norway-based media company. Dune later came out of stealth mode last fall after having been backed by Binance's startup incubator. 

 The end result is an open-walled analytics platform that provides free services, with premium offerings as a value-add to customers that want a more customized experience, such as private queries and data exports. Though the premium services preceded Dune’s community offering, it was the latter that Haga credited as a major force behind Dune’s recent growth.

“The key insight we’ve had along the way that’s made Dune so powerful is that when you open it up and just say, ‘This is free and open to the community’ and people can build on each other,” he told The Block. “That turns into something very powerful, as opposed to sort of a walled garden where only you internally or the customers alone in the siloed fashion interact with the data.”

Among those customers are the seed round investors themselves, who Haga said were “easy to reach out to and convince once we had this momentum that we have now.”

Haga went on to say that the funds would be used to scale the team to support the growth of the site and, more specifically, meet the demands of an expanding user base.

“We’re in the position where people are begging us for features, and as a two-man team, we simply can’t deliver on the things our users want,” said Haga. “It was very obvious that we would need to scale up the team to serve the demand we’re seeing.”

“We’ll definitely be a bigger team,” he said when asked about the one-year outlook, post-funding. “Still fairly contained. Like, a two-pizza team, let’s put it that way.”

Haga added that “[w]e still think there’s a lot of power and building tooling that the community can leverage.”

“So I think, really, growing the team and building more powerful tooling for the community,” he went on to say. “Having a product that’s more engaging, easier to get started with, and also that allows you to do more powerful analysis and interact with others in an easier manner than you can today.”