In all but a mere two years, Kurtosis has seemingly already captured the minds of talented Web3 developers and burgeoning engineering potential in the sphere. A new Series A round, which Coatue led, now pumps $20 million into the company as it aims to streamline the developer tools underpinning the rather tricky and still infantile Web3 ecosystem.
Kurtosis currently aids developers in ecosystems such as Avalanche, NEAR, Solana, and Ethereum, but it hopes to broaden its existing services over the next several years. Founded by Galen Marchetti and Kevin Today, two ex-Palantir engineers, Kurtosis is seeking to make it easier for developers to build in Web3 environments, the main among them being a test net environment, wherein software developers can approach problems in a safe space.
"Developers need a place to play around and see where their modifications to the system are safe or work. It's like building an airplane without using an air tunnel on the ground," explained Marchetti to TechCrunch. "There's a bunch of instances where the airplane immediately crashes. It's the same thing here."
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One primary aim for Kurtosis currently is to build varied test nets for specific organizations, either private or public, which can be used for a multitude of purposes. Of major importance is finding a way to alleviate risks in long-term engineering stacks, ensuring that Web3 hacks are less common in the face of more properly produced early-stage systems. As of July this year, a whopping $2 billion was already lost in 2022 due to Web3 hacks, which was more than all of 2021 combined, proof alone by the fact that Web3 software requires more security parameters and dedicated development tools.
Invested via the likes of Coinbase Ventures, Datadog CEO and founder Olivier Pomel, the Chainsmokers' Mantis VC, and more, the $20 million cash influx will allow Kurtosis to add more talent to its roster and aid in the development of a new product slated for debut within the next six to 12 months, according to Marchetti. The firm has already announced its new string of hiring across its product and engineering lines on Twitter and is quite motivated to build better tools for the future of technology.
"We needed to raise capital because the company started as just me and my co-founder and the more we learned about the problems people are facing in these [blockchain] environments, the more we realized the software we would have to build as two developers would take us five years, which is way too long," said Marchetti.
The firm's new bump in the capital is received almost a year to the date following its $2.5 million seed round captured last August. Marchetti himself worked at Palantir as a forward deployed engineer for the better part of five years, while his colleague. Today, who now acts as CTO of Kurtosis, provides a slew of live and dead tools previously built on his own web page, the main among them being a financial planning tool called Wealthdraft.
According to the firm's LinkedIn page, Kurtosis currently employs a total of four staff members, making talent acquisition all the more dire as it ramps up the production of new products and tools that will only aid the future engineers and developers working in Web3 in the long term.
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