Our investment in Coherent

While the promise of the cryptocurrency market and its goal of decentralization is hotly debated, blockchain technology continues to attract thousands of talented developers and founders. They see a disruptive technology that provides a new way of building companies and connecting society. Some estimate that there are over 20k active blockchain developers, growing 100% year-over-year, and over 83m unique crypto wallets. But it’s still early days, and there’s a significant need for infrastructure to support this massive technological shift.

Building web3 applications in today’s market isn’t efficient or scalable. A major challenge for developers working on NFT projects, web3 social, token gating, and other decentralized applications is retrieving, managing, and utilizing the user data necessary to build strong user experiences consumers have grown accustomed to.

Coherent is solving these challenges with core infrastructure that provides web3 user data to blockchain developers via a suite of APIs. With Coherent, developers can do in minutes what used to take weeks. The product powers a rich set of user experiences using the most common pieces of blockchain data, sharing information such as: human-readable transaction data, tagging for query transaction types, aggregating all NFTs in a user’s portfolio that includes metadata, cached images, floor price, and rarity, balances for tokens on a given chain, and more. 

Working toward its vision of a multi-chain offering, the company is starting with products for the Ethereum developer community, followed by Polygon and Solana.

Our investment in Coherent is particularly exciting for us as the company is led by a Foundry alum – our former intern, Carl Cortright, who we fondly referred to as “CTI” (Carl The Intern). Carl worked with us while studying machine learning and computer science at CU Boulder. He went on to intern for Coinbase, ultimately joining after graduation and working his way to senior software engineer and a member of the Coinbase Ventures team. Carl is joined by fellow Coinbase alums, Justin Choi and Ellen Choi. At Coinbase, the team worked together to develop critical platform infrastructure and experienced first hand the problems they’re solving at Coherent. In keeping with our network-driven investing strategy, Foundry co-led Coherent’s seed round alongside our partner fund Kindred Ventures, who bring significant expertise in web3 and company-building. Matchstick Ventures, a Foundry partner fund, and Coinbase Ventures also participated in the round, and the company recently joined Techstars Boulder’s summer 2022 class.

We are thrilled to welcome Coherent into our portfolio, to welcome Carl back to Foundry, and to support the development of core infrastructure in web3. You can learn more about Coherent and the financing here.