Why we invested in Moralis
Fabric Ventures is thrilled to be investing in a Series A round in Moralis alongside Coinbase, EQT, and other investors.
Providing tools to improve the developer experience has been an important part of the web2 landscape for the past decade. The demand to streamline and synthesize developer tasks to speed up production, quality, and deployment have created a market with tens of billions in annual revenue, and one that continues to grow as software continues to “eat the world”.
This problem of developer experience is, if anything, only more acute in web3. The coding languages of web3 are mostly specific to this industry, and require some level of retraining for software developers looking to enter the industry. Furthermore, the number of existing developers in web3 is still small in absolute terms, meaning there are few highly adept native users, with less than 20k total monthly active developers as of December 2021- of these developers, 59% entered the field that year.
Web2 developers are increasingly entering the space, however, and these developers are looking to adopt tools which will make their work easier and quicker. Providers who can best service these demands, allowing easy dapp creation, will be able to carve out significant value.
Moralis is best positioned as the go-to shop for dapp development. It offers a full spectrum of products for developers, from tutorials, to their SDK for easy development, to their fast and reliable Node API (fully integrated with Moralis services), to their Web API facilitating collection of all kinds of blockchain data (including NFTs). As an analogy, it is positioned as the Firebase of web3.
Despite only being founded a year ago, Moralis has generated impressive traction. Leveraging the personality and internet presence of founder and youtuber Ivan Lijeqvist, the company already receives the most eyeballs in the industry, and has added tens of thousands of new developers every month to its platform.
For any new team looking to newly build on web3 the full spectrum of Moralis offerings make them the clear choice. They not only take care of the backend services with reliable and fast Node provision, but also provide an SDK with functionality to significantly reduce development time, and allow you to call relevant data using their API. We believe that being able to provide all these services is crucial for future monetization and value accrual, and that developers (particularly newer developers coming from web2) will not want to integrate with too many separate offerings and would rather let Moralis handle all of their backend needs.
For web and game developers, Moralis provides an SDK for the following languages and frameworks: JavaScript, React, Node.js, Unity, and C#. Moralis prides itself on decreasing the average time-to-market by 87%. This is because Moralis abstracts away along with chain-specific implementation details and boilerplate code through asynchronous API calls. Looking at the code, one may observe that it looks similar to a Web 2 application, with API calls being made to Moralis Servers, which represent a link between the applications’ frontend and blockchain.
Furthermore, Moralis receives outstanding reviews across the developer community, something we have had direct references on from our existing portfolio companies. The quality of the API, the cross-chain support, and the suite of functionality offered have all been directly highlighted to us. Producing a great product is ultimately the best way to generate traction and stickiness among developers, and we believe that Moralis is best positioned to achieve this.
We are also excited to deepen our relationship with Moralis through our Fabric X programme. Supporting founders at every level of a company, from ideation through to initial product-market fit and beyond has always been an integral part of Fabric’s DNA, and we have long been proponents of supporting the highest quality technical talent to play around in web3 — there are so many engineers who are excited by what they can build but need time to really explore the crypto landscape without the immediate economic pressures that leaving previous jobs can bring. Noticing the bottleneck of developers and entrepreneurs in the Web 3 ecosystem, and realizing that they needed a nourishing environment to start off their Web 3 journey — we created the Fabric X programme, beginning with the first cohort Le Crypto Fellowship in France. We have been delighted by the initial results of Le Crypto Fellowship and were struck by how many teams naturally used Moralis as their go-to tool. We are looking forward to strengthening this relationship still further as we launch more incubators across different geographies.
We back the boldest technologists & communities at the earliest stages, supporting them throughout their journey and becoming active participants within the networks they are building.
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