Building the Go-to Platform for Blockchain Development: Our Investment in Tenderly

Over the years, we’ve been fortunate to partner with a number of the reference platforms in traditional development: Atlassian for collaboration, Vercel for deployment, Sentry for alerting, and Instana for monitoring, to name just a few. And now an exciting new opportunity is emerging in blockchain development. The blockchain and DeFi ecosystems have seen tremendous growth over the last 12 months, shifting into mainstream awareness as NFTs have made global headlines with sales surpassing $2B and total value locked in DeFi exceeding $60B as the decentralized internet continues to flourish.

Blockchain developers everywhere are racing to recreate traditional Web 2.0 applications for Web 3.0, leveraging blockchain technology. These applications are core to the emerging Web 3.0 universe, from decentralized platforms for lending and exchange, to mechanisms for proof of digital identity and ownership. The blockchain developer ecosystem is growing rapidly and showing no signs of slowing down. But shifting from building Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 applications isn’t a simple evolution - it’s complex and requires a totally different set of tooling and knowledge. With every transaction irreversible, transparent by design, and carrying a financial cost, there’s an even greater need for robust and resilient apps with effective monitoring and alerting. 

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While many believe that decentralized protocols, pioneered by Ethereum, are set to become one of the core pillars of the internet, the current state of Web 3.0 developer tools is holding back adoption. Blockchain development is needlessly difficult and requires developers to invest 10x more time and effort to learn new skills and become productive. Faced with these frustrations firsthand, Andrej Bencic, Bogdan Habic, Miljan Tekic, and Nebojsa Urosevic set out to create a platform that would enable the next wave of decentralized applications to be built. And so Tenderly was born.

Tenderly’s mission is to enable developers to navigate this new frontier and make blockchain development as powerful and efficient as possible with a product suite that teams love. Today, they’re focused on driving down development time and cost for developers working with smart contracts. They’ve built a suite of mission-critical tools that empowers developers at every step of the way, with deep functionality across debugging, testing, monitoring, alerting, and more.

Tenderly has already made a name for itself in blockchain development: its visual debugger is regularly used by tens of thousands of smart contract developers; more than 5 million alerts are sent from the platform monthly; and their transaction simulator currently processes more than 3 million transactions every day. This is more than the daily throughput of the entire Ethereum network, demonstrating the versatility and adoption rate of the Tenderly platform. 

Building a developer platform in this space is no small feat, but we believe the Tenderly team has the depth of engineering knowledge and domain expertise to win. Andrej, Bogdan, Miljan, and Nebojsa have worked together for their entire careers and have already achieved a lot. We’re excited to be leading the company’s Series A, joined by Point Nine and a group of world-class angels, including several founders from the Accel family such as Nicolas Dessaigne (Algolia), Mirko Novakovic (Instana), and Guillermo Rauch (Vercel). 

We’re also pleased to have Tenderly take us into new territory as our first investment in Serbia, increasing our presence in CEE alongside longstanding partnerships with UiPath in Romania and Avito in Russia. 

We’re excited to be joining forces with Tenderly as they pave the way for faster blockchain adoption and bring Web 3.0 into the mainstream!