Alchemy Insights Inc. today announced that it has raised $250 million in funding at a $3.5 billion valuation, about seven times what the startup was worth six months ago, to help developers build blockchain-based apps.

San Francisco-based Alchemy says its sales have grown even faster than its valuation over the past six months. The startup’s revenue is 15 times higher than in April, a milestone it managed to reach while also achieving profitability. It didn’t specify absolute revenue.

Alchemy’s latest funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz. The prominent venture capital firm was joined in the investment by Lightspeed and Redpoint, as well as returning backers Coatue, Addition, DFJ and Pantera.

Alchemy describes its mission as “doing for blockchain and Web3 what AWS did for the internet.” The startup has created a set of cloud-based services to simplify many of the most complicated development tasks involved in creating blockchain applications. Reducing the amount of custom code that blockchain developers must write allows them to build software faster and more cost-efficiently.

One of Alchemy’s main offerings is a service called Supernode. It aims to reduce the amount of work required to manage nodes, important components of blockchain implementations that play a key role in processing transactions.

Nodes are responsible for, among other tasks, storing data about the transactions made through a blockchain. Alchemy’s Supernode service provides features that help developers ensure the transaction data stored in nodes is correct and up to date. Supernode also simplifies certain other tasks, such as scaling blockchains. The result is that developers can spend less time building blockchain infrastructure and invest more resources in enhancing their applications. 

Alchemy’s other offerings each focus on a different aspect of the software development workflow. One service, Build, makes it possible to find software bugs by analyzing patterns in historical blockchain transactions. Another service called Monitor helps developers identify additional types of technical issues, such as an unexpected decrease in the number of processed transactions or a sudden latency spike.

Alongside essentials such as ensuring infrastructure reliability, another common requirement for blockchain applications is the ability to send push notifications. A blockchain-powered financial app, for example, may have a feature that alerts users when a transaction is complete. Alchemy provides an aptly-named service called Notify that automates some of the work involved in implementing notification features for blockchain applications.

Alchemy said today that it plans to open new offices and make its services more accessible by, among other things, creating educational resources for developers. The startup has no shortage of capital for investing in growth initiatives following its latest $250 million funding round. Moreover, Alchemy co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Nikil Viswanathan (pictured, left, with co-founder and  Chief Technology Officer Joe Lau), told TechCrunch today that the startup still has all the proceeds from its previous $80 million funding round in the bank. 

Viswanathan also described Alchemy as being “very profitable,” which is a major achievement given that many, if not most, high-growth startups operate at a loss to sustain their sales momentum. The fact that the startup is profitable is particularly impressive given its services only launched last August.

Photo: Alchemy