Alchemy, a San Francisco-based enterprise-grade distributed ledger blockchain company, announced today the worldwide debut of its infrastructure platform and the closure of a $15 million funding round including investors from Pantera Capital, Stanford University and Coinbase Inc.

Founded in 2017 by Joe Lau and Nikil Viswanathan (pictured), Alchemy has grown to be a global blockchain infrastructure company powering over a million users weekly in over 200 countries globally. The company’s mission is to provide reliable, critical infrastructure for companies to adopt blockchain and bring the technology mainstream.

When asked about blockchain’s influence, Alchemy Chief Executive Nikil Viswanathan said that the company started on the premise that computer operating systems brought computational technology to the mainstream and that accessible infrastructure could do the same for blockchain.

“We realized blockchain technology would develop in the same way,” Alchemy Chief Technology Officer Joe Lau said, “so we’re working to enable mainstream adoption by providing the industry with the high-quality infrastructure and developer tools that it needs.”

The company current works with major contributors to blockchain services across numerous industries including CryptoKitties, a cryptoasset-based social-media game that allows people to breed and trade virtual cats; Augur.io, an oracle and prediction market platform; OpenSea Inc., a virtual asset trading marketplace for blockchain-enabled games; and Immutable, the developer of “Gods Unchained,” a blockchain-based trading card game on the Ethereum blockchain also backed by Coinbase.

“Alchemy is an absolute game-changer,” said Eric Lin, head of engineering at CryptoKitties. “It powers all of our blockchain infrastructure and has greatly accelerated our business.”

Alchemy’s platform claims to be orders of magnitude more reliable and scalable than existing alternatives and is designed around blockchain-specific developer tools in order to provide what it claims are best-in-class features. By using blockchain technology and the platform, customers can reliably and quickly create applications that can accelerate product development, integrate blockchain technology and greatly reduce costs.

“Using your own node or an error-prone service means wasting hundreds of valuable engineering hours on problems that have nothing to do with your company,” said Alex Atallah, co-founder and chief technology officer at OpenSea. “Nothing else compares to Alchemy’s amazing level of reliability, speed, support.”

To make mainstream blockchain integration a reality, Alchemy provides infrastructure for companies to execute transactions atop, an enhanced application programming interface to access and orchestrate blockchain apps and developer tools to build and deploy those apps. For business and operations teams, the platform also provides a back-end featuring real-time monitoring to promote better uptime and user experiences as well as an analytics engine that provides insights into product engagement and user activity.

Other investors that also joined in this Series A funding round include Mayfield Fund, SignalFire LLC, Samsung, StartX, Kenetic and Dreamers VC, and prominent individual investors including Charles Schwab (founder, Charles Schwab) John Hennessy (chairman, Google), Reid Hoffman (founder, LinkedIn), Tom Glocer (former CEO, Thomson Reuters) and Jerry Yang (founder, Yahoo).

The platform has been in use across these industries for the past two years. This announcement launches the Alchemy blockchain for general availability worldwide. Starting today, business users interested in integrating the platform can sign up at Alchemy’s website.

Photo: Alchemy