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Tenderly: An Overview
A deep-dive into a company that raised $40m and has 500% YoY growth
Hey there š ,
One of the goals of this newsletter is to spend time analyzing companies I find interesting in the web3/Blockchain ecosystem.
The last nine issues (hooray for the tenth!) have been more around curation of articles I find interesting, and I thought to include a piece on a company Iām finding interesting right now - Tenderly.
If you like this type of format, let me know either way :)
- Fahim
Tenderly - Supercharging Blockchain Developers
While everyone else is trying to find gold, find the companies selling shovels to the masses.
This has been something Iāve been thinking about for a number of years, and after seeing the DevOps movement coalesce and take off from around 2010 onwards (I joined a Developer Tools company in the QA space in 2013), it can be far easier to build solutions for development teams.
The other trend Iāve been thinking about is the Apps -> Infrastructure -> Apps -> Infrastructure Cycle (more info about this here).
Essentially, this is saying that we need better infrastructure, which will then lead to better apps being developed.
As the DeFi movement grew over the past 24 months, āblockchain infrastructureā startups will likely take the mantel ahead of other industry themes, as increasing momentum in the blockchain and crypto markets brings more developers and funding to a nascent space.
One company thatās caught my eye is Tenderly - itās a developer platform catering to blockchain developers to monitor and test the smart contracts that power their decentralized apps.
In a nutshell: Tenderly makes it easier for web3 developers to build blockchain products.
Theyāve got a solid team and have just announced their $40m Series B funding - only a few months after closing on its Series A for $15m.
Letās deep-dive into some key areas as to why they exist and whatās to come.
Market - The Challenge & Market Potential
While building decentralized applications on top of a blockchain has become more common, it still feels like a clunky experience to deploy new updates.
Similarly, with the web2 industry and the development of Agile & DevOps since the 2000ās, teams realized that in order to deliver software successfully, they needed a vast array of better options & tooling to build more general-purpose software (software that can take on complex tasks).
What we saw with the development of monitoring and observability tools like NewRelic, Dynatrace, Datadog to help teams monitor their applications once they released new software, the infrastructure to do this for decentralized applications (āDappsā) is lacking.
Tenderly is built exactly for this - a platform designed to develop, test and monitor the health of decentralized applications.
The team started building a developer platform focused on Ethereum as this is where the majority of developers live, with more than 4,000 developers actively working on Ethereum per month.
Is this a problem that needs a solution for the 4k (and growing) number of Ethereum developers?
Developers need better tools available to build decentralized applications
Developers have certain expectations with the tooling available to them in traditional forms of software
Monitoring and debugging tools are imperative to teams building better software at speed without compromising usability
So Iād say, yes, itās a problem that needs solving!
How big could this market get?
The Blockchain market size is projected to grow from USD 4.9 billion in 2021 to USD 67.4 billion by 2026 - I can imagine the ecosystem will take on a flywheel approach of pulling in more developers and more activity (in terms of number of people and amount of funding).
Product:
We can talk all day about the potential for market growth, but we need a good product to begin with.
While being at a developer tools company myself, I recognize the pain of needing better developer tooling to help teams release on time and fix issues faster. However, itās difficult and cumbersome to replicate user issues once a bug report has been submitted, and itās not easy to retrieve the right information
The typical flow that happens is:
Teams develop software ā errors occur because users discover issues and complain (or, sometimes they just move onto something else)ā teams find out about errors and struggle to deploy a fix.
Tenderly allows developer teams to:
Teams develop software using the Tenderly platform ā error occurs AND notifies the team of the issue ā Visual Debugger to find exactly where the issue has occurred in the console logs ā developers release updated software to production
You can read about the specific tools on their site, but hereās a short summary of their software suite:
Visual Debugger - instantly find the line your transaction failed on
State Inspector - See the state of your contract at any point in time
Smart Contract Analytics - Gain insights into transaction data
Real-time alerting - event triggers across slack, email etc
Gas profiler - Optimize smart contracts to lower gas costs
Simulated environments to know how transactions will behave ahead of time
Integrations - Access to their API to view real-time blockchain data
While Tenderly has focused on Ethereum up until now (this came from the founding team solving their own itch), Tenderly has evolved into a wider blockchain developer platform that processes more than 25 million transactions daily - it now covers blockchains such as Avalanche, Fantom, Optimism and Arbitrum.
Team:
Tenderly has a compelling founding story rooted in trust and expertise.
The company was founded in 2018 by friends Andrej Bencic, Bogdan Habic, Miljan Tekic and Nebojsa Urosevic after years of working together building applications on the Blockchain and feeling frustrated about what they saw (or didnāt see).
They knew that in order for more developers to feel like developing applications on the blockchain was accessible to them, there had to be a set of easy-to-use and familiar tools to attract these developers.
The founding team (primarily Serbian-based) has got a background previously working at companies like Decenter, MVP Workshop and GoDaddy, so their years working together have primed them to solve a problem they are incredibly familiar with.
Conclusion:
With tens of thousands of developers using Tenderly to monitor the health of the apps and smart contracts, a 500% increase in revenue year-over-year, Iām bullish they will continue executing as well as they have, with their new injection of funding going towards customer acquisition and building out their technical and sales teams.
Sources:
š Resources of the week:
I found out about some DAOās I knew little about (BFF DAO) and others I was happy to see continuing to get recognition (BanklessDAO & DeveloperDAO).
The investment is part of a set of new policies to build out emerging digital technologies such as the metaverse & artificial intelligence platforms. Metaverse Seoul, here we come!
Two Teenagers pitch 100+ VCs with no success.
Instead, they bootstrapped their startup to millions in profits until VCs came calling.
The crazy part?
Today the company is worth over $40BN and they have full control.
You've used the app, but you don't know the story šš½šš½šš½
ā Jesse Pujji (@jspujji)
6:40 PM ā¢ Mar 4, 2022
The story of Canva is inspiring and this thread had tons of good lessons namely:
SEO / content works at scale
Invest in user education
You can build a great company anywhere
Grit wins
Until next time
As always, if you're enjoying Living In Beta, I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two. If anything stood out, whether good or bad, I would love to hear about it. Reply to this email or tweet at me and letās chat.
Until next time,
Fahim