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ChainShot, the target, has been installed by the hackathon since its inception
Web3 developer infrastructure Startup Alchemy, which last raised $200 million in C1 last February, has just made its first acquisition — and it’s in the education space. The company has acquired Chainshot, an education startup that runs bootcamps for Web3 developers, Alchemy founder and CEO Nikhil Viswanathan told TechCrunch exclusively. Alchemy did not disclose the terms of the deal.
For Alchemy, the acquisition seems fitting given that the company’s goal is to be a starting point for developers looking to build applications on the blockchain. It is often referred to Web3’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) and claims to have seen a 10x increase in the number of teams building on the platform in the past 12 months. Its value has grown at an impressive rate, even for a crypto startup — it reached that $10.2 billion valuation 16 months after its launch.
Its rapid growth has certainly caught the attention of investors, a group that includes high-profile names such as Lightspeed, Silver Lake, a16z, Coatue and Pantera. The company says it handles more than $150 billion in annual transactions for clients including NFT platform OpenSea and DeFi app Quantstamp.
The target ChainShot started as a hackathon project at the ETDenver conference in 2018, ChainShot founder Cody McCabe told TechCrunch in an interview. McCabe, who was inspired to found ChainShot after going through a coding bootcamp himself, says the company had Bootstrap before buying Alchemy. In addition to the founders’ personal capital (which includes funds already in McCabe’s 401k), ChainShot will cover its costs through its connection to the Ethereum ecosystem and grants through Web3’s crowdfunding platform Gitcoin, he said.
While ChainShot declined to share the exact number of students it works with, the company has reported a 180% growth in student enrollment since January 2022.
More than half of the students who go through the program find work within six months of graduation, he said. This seems high compared to other coding bootcamps like Lambda School, which has a placement rate of around ~30% – and many of the more popular coding bootcamps are believed to have exaggerated their placement numbers.
Chainshot founders Dan Nolan and Cody McCabe Image Credits: ChainShot
Another Web3-focused coding bootcamp, Encode Club, told TechCrunch in May that it had a similar 50%+ placement rate to ChainShot, but primarily accepted experienced coders into the program. ChainShot, by contrast, doesn’t have a vetting process for its students, and when it did in the past, it looked for “people who are actively trying to change and get into the ecosystem” rather than experienced software engineers, McCabe said.
“We looked at all the education platforms in the space, and the results speak for themselves very well about ChainShot,” said Viswanathan.
The ChainShot program is currently built around a 10-week holistic bootcamp for developers looking to build on Ethereum, McCabe explained. The company plans to add asynchronous content such as videos as it integrates with Alchemy, and hopes to eventually expand its offering to other blockchains, he added, noting that ChainShot only had four employees last year.
Once folded into Alchemy, ChainShot will join the crypto infrastructure company’s two education-related properties, the self-paced coding programs Web3 U and Path to Web3. It will also drop the fees it previously charged students and offer the product at no cost, a long-term goal for ChainShot now under the Alchemy umbrella, McCabe said.
As for Alchemy, Viswanathan hinted that it will continue to pursue potential acquisition targets, particularly in the developer tools space, as it looks to significantly expand its offerings with a team of 90 employees.
“We’re a small team… if we had 500 people, everyone would be working 24/7 and we’d be putting out a lot of products, but we have a lot of things that we can’t build because of our bandwidth limitations in terms of engineering capacity. So we always try to increase our services,” said Viswanathan.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about how we deliver the best experience for people building in Web3, and if we see a team that has a better product experience for our customers, we’re definitely excited to work with them,” he added.
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