If AWS had a baby with Ethereum, it would look like Alchemy. Two Stanford grads built the infrastructure layer that most blockchain applications run on — and most crypto users have never heard of them. That's by design. Alchemy powers the backends of OpenSea, Adobe, Shopify, and hundreds of other crypto products. They hit a $10.2 billion valuation in 2022 by being the most important company nobody talks about.
Founded
2017
HQ
San Francisco, California
Total Raised
$545 million
Founder
Nikil Viswanathan and Joe Lau
Status
Private
Website
www.alchemy.comTHE ORIGIN STORY
Nikil Viswanathan and Joe Lau met at Stanford and had previously built a social app called Down to Lunch that hit #1 in the App Store. When they discovered blockchain, they realized the developer experience was terrible — building on Ethereum was like building websites in 1995.
Nodes crashed, data was unreliable, debugging was impossible. They decided to build what AWS did for the internet: reliable, scalable infrastructure that developers could trust.
They launched Alchemy in 2017 and spent two years in stealth mode, signing up customers privately before going public with their platform.
WHAT THEY ACTUALLY DO
Alchemy operates a freemium developer platform. The core product is Supernode — a blockchain infrastructure service that developers use to connect their applications to blockchain networks.
Free tier for small developers, paid plans scaling by compute units and request volume. They also offer Alchemy Account Kit (smart wallets), Alchemy Webhooks, enhanced APIs, and NFT APIs.
Revenue grows linearly with blockchain adoption — every new dApp, NFT marketplace, or DeFi protocol that launches potentially becomes an Alchemy customer.
THE PRODUCTS
Alchemy Supernode (blockchain infrastructure), Alchemy Account Kit (smart wallets/account abstraction), Alchemy NFT API, Alchemy Webhooks, Alchemy Notify (real-time alerts), Alchemy SDK, Alchemy Subgraphs, free blockchain development courses (Alchemy University).
HOW THEY GREW
Alchemy grew by offering a dramatically better developer experience than running your own nodes. Their strategy mirrors early AWS: give developers free or cheap access, make it easy to start, then scale revenue as their applications grow.
They signed marquee customers (OpenSea, Adobe, Shopify) and used those logos to attract more developers. They expanded beyond Ethereum to support Polygon, Solana, Arbitrum, Optimism, and other chains — becoming a multi-chain infrastructure provider.
THE HARD PART
Alchemy's valuation dropped significantly from its $10.2 billion peak as the crypto market cooled in 2022-2023. The company is dependent on overall blockchain activity — when NFT trading collapsed and DeFi volumes dropped, Alchemy's usage metrics dropped too.
Competition from QuickNode, Moralis, and even Infura (ConsenSys) is intense. There's also the question of whether blockchain infrastructure will become commoditized over time, compressing margins the way cloud hosting did.
MONEY TRAIL
2021 · Led by
$NaNM raised
2021 · Led by
$NaNM raised
2022 · Led by
$NaNM raised
WHO BACKED THEM
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Lightspeed Venture Partners, Silver Lake, Coatue, DFJ Growth, Samsung, Stanford University, Charles Schwab, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang
Head-to-Head
Compare Alchemy vs another company.