Tenderly Raised $40M Series B to Simplify Blockchain Development

I am incredibly humbled and excited to share that Tenderly recently closed a $40 million Series B round, led by Spark Capital, with participation from both new and existing investors Accel, PointNine Capital, Abstract Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Uniswap Labs, and Daedalus, as well as angel investors Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel), Jinglan Wang (Co-Founder and CEO of Optimism), Eric Ries (Founder of Long-Term Stock Exchange) and Tihomir Bajic (CEO of LTSE Software).

As with our previous rounds, we continued our lucky streak with Spark Capital and Yasmin Razavi, who joined our existing investors in leading this round. Yasmin proved to be a great advisor that embraced Tenderly’s core values, adding substantial expertise to the mix.

While we are celebrating this news, I wanted to take this opportunity to take a step back and look at the road we’ve been through so far, as well as share a glimpse of what’s to come.

A bit of backstory

2021 has been a crazy year for everybody, particularly for the Tenderly team. We went from being bootstrapped to a rapidly growing startup at a dizzying pace. We expanded our product offering from a few monitoring and debugging services to providing an entire ecosystem of products that cater to developers from their very first steps all the way to running dApps in production, serving millions of users.

We’ve had the pleasure of working extensively with some of the best teams and protocols in the space, all the while listening very closely to what they have to say and making sure they can work most effectively while building pivotal products for success and traction of the entire blockchain ecosystem.

To do all that, we also grew quite a bit. From a tiny startup of 7 in Belgrade, Serbia, to a multi-continent team of 37 and growing quickly. We have some big plans for the future, and to make them happen, we need some serious muscle to get there!

Why are we here?

We started building Tenderly with the mission to create a better environment for all web3 developers to build in. We’ve witnessed firsthand how difficult it is to move quickly when you don’t have the support of tools and services to give you a boost along the way. As time went on, our dedication to this mission only grew, especially as we saw more and more ways we can make the entire developer journey better, ultimately creating an environment in which fast-paced web3 teams can innovate and thrive!

On this incredible journey, we were able to meaningfully impact tens of thousands of developers and help them build successful products from the ideation phase to production. All the generous feedback we got along the way pushes us to continue working towards our vision to make blockchain an essential and fundamental building block across the web. We’re shooting for a world where the sentence “My project is Web3” is as commonplace as “My project is running on the cloud”.

We’ve now spent more than three years at the center of web3 innovation, working closely with the pioneers of the space, amassing heaps of unique insights and knowledge about what is essential for creating an ideal development ecosystem. Given all that, I’m confident to say that we’re ready to take Tenderly to the next level!

To do that, we are taking the platform we built so far and striking two key paths in which we will evolve:

1. Tenderly as a Development Environment - Continue to build the best in class developer experience, constantly looking for ways to improve it by adding new features and resources for both new and seasoned developers in space.
2. Tenderly as a Platform - Something exciting we’ve been working on behind the scenes with some of the amazing innovators in our customer base. We’ll be gradually uncovering more on this in the coming months. Be on the lookout!

Tenderly as a Development Environment

So far, the Tenderly Dashboard has been our staple, something with wide recognition in the developer community as well as a first touchpoint for discovering Tenderly’s capabilities.

We got the Dashboard to the point of becoming the most advanced and comprehensive environment for rapid and high-quality Smart Contracts development — with all the essential tools for a streamlined and powerful development process.

On top of constantly thinking about improving what we already have (Debugger, Simulator, Forks, Gas Profiler, etc.), we’re also working hard to bring you something pretty exciting soon! I’m not going to reveal too much, but let’s just say that the Tenderly Development Environment will take on an entirely new meaning. 😉

Tenderly as a Platform

We are also introducing numerous building blocks for Web3 builders based on our advanced APIs, Simulation Platform, and Web3 Actions ecosystem. For developers, this means the ability to integrate Tenderly capabilities directly into their dApps and development workflows.

The number of ways we’ve seen different teams integrate Tenderly is exceptional — we‘re constantly blown away by how innovative this space really is! We’ve seen our APIs used as a testing harness, fuzzing environment, CI/CD pipeline, QA framework, a DAO watchdog, user onboarding sandbox, and even full-blown systems doing some pretty complex computations.

The crazy thing is that this is just the start — we can only imagine what types of solutions we’ll see running on top of Tenderly tech as we make the platform open to everybody!

The Ecosystem

Of course, Tenderly does not exist in a vacuum; that’s why we need to acknowledge the surrounding flourishing web3 ecosystem that helped us rapidly grow in the past couple of years.

Whether through user feedback, insightful online and offline conversations, blogs, news articles, conferences - people who enriched our experiences and helped us learn in this industry are countless. What we would like to do now is try to give back at least a bit. Through different educational programs and sponsorships, we also want to support what’s close to our hearts and help developers onboard to web3 and excel beyond what they think is possible.

Finally, I’d love to thank the ever-growing and amazing Tenderly team. By constantly improving, thinking outside the box, and challenging the status quo, you all have made Tenderly the company it is today!

Here’s to an even better 2022! 🍷