The Future of Web3 Infrastructure: Why We Invested in NXYZ

Despite the recent FTX debacle, blockchain technology is one of the most promising innovations of the past decade, and one that has been rapidly evolving. Just as we’ve previously seen in fintech, decentralized computing is growing, and we are seeing many use cases evolve across multiple sectors. We believe that the infrastructure of this new technology is worth our time and will produce outsized returns from our investments.

Enter nxyz: a company that makes web3 projects easy to build through APIs that retrieve data across chains and assets with lightning speed. Their first product, currently in the beta stage, is a configurable API that has processed over 5 billion transactions as of October, across the Ethereum, Polygon, Binance, Avalanche AVAX, Arbitrum, and Optimism chains. It supports NFTs, ERC-20s and other assets, and the company plans to expand their solutions to handle more use cases by the end of this year.

The company is spearheaded by Sridhar Ramaswamy, a visionary figure who believes in creating technology that serves the common good. Sridhar has been a model of engineering excellence and business leadership for more than two decades. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University and spent fifteen years developing and managing Google’s entire ads business. Less than a year after leaving Google, he built a brand-new premium ad-less search engine, Neeva, while also investing as a Venture Partner at Greylock. He is the perfect founder for a deep infrastructural product like nxyz.

Sridhar led Greylock’s Series A investment into Gretel.ai, one of Moonshots Capital’s earliest portfolio companies where we led the Series Seed, and he is one of their board members along with me. I have long been impressed by Sridhar’s extraordinary technical expertise paired with excellent business acumen. When Sridhar launched nxyz, we had no doubt that he was on track to building something truly revolutionary, so it was only natural for us to support Sridhar and his team.

Sridhar’s entrepreneurial skills were honed at Google, where he steadily climbed the ranks since 2003 and served as Senior VP of Ads & Commerce from 2013 to 2018. When he joined the company, Google Ads was a $1.5 billion business, and by the time he left, it had an annual revenue run rate was $100 billion. Sridhar’s departure from Google was motivated by the desire to build companies of his own: in January 2019, he founded Neeva, an ad-free search engine that shows personalized results without advertisement clutter or influence. Still privately-owned, Neeva has raised a total of $77.5M, and it was valued at $300M as of its Series B round in March 2021.

Sridhar’s co-founders are VP Nathan Wiegand, CTO Todd Wang, and CPO Baris Gutelkin. All three co-founders share experience working at Google: Todd was a core architect of Google Search, and Baris co-founded and led Google Now and later worked on Google Assistant. nxyz’s founders also include three of its brilliant software engineers: Bindu Pucha, Joshua Davis, and Rajaram Gaunker.

The company joins Moonshots Capital’s growing ranks of blockchain-based companies like Zabo (sold to Coinbase), Transmute and Afterparty. While we remain industry-agnostic investors with a primary focus on extraordinary leadership and an emphasis on military veteran founders, we are drawn to the promising future of web3. We will continue to develop specialized know-how and network in the domain and will share both with the rest of our portfolio companies as appropriate.

We were proud to join nxyz’s $40 million Series A round led by Paradigm and with participation from Greylock, Sequoia Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and prominent web3 angels, and we are excited for the company’s role in shaping the future of the internet. We were fortunate to be able to invest in the company as it was massively oversubscribed. As always, we will work to add value to Sridhar and his team!

Moonshots Capital is a veteran-founded venture capital firm that invests in early-stage startups with extraordinary leaders.
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