Setting a blowtorch to web3 bugs, Berlin’s Blocktorch raises $4.2 million

Berlin-based Blocktorch has raised $4.2 million in a seed funding round. Reflecting the growing maturity of web3 technologies, Blocktorch provides developers with an observability platform to help them understand the behaviour of their decentralised applications and root out errors before they become catastrophes.

Blocktorch’s $4.2 million seed round was led by Ideo CoLab Ventures with participation from Speedinvest, RockawayX, Alchemy Ventures, Remote First Ventures, Bryce Ferguson for Sequoia’s scout program, Charlie Songhurst, Simon Jones (Voltz Labs CEO), Andreas Klinger, Max Stoeckl (Dogami CEO), Henry Chen (GP WAGMI Ventures), Felix Wolf and Entrepreneur First.

The capital is aimed at helping Blocktorch grow its engineering and commercial teams ahead of the official launch of the service.

According to a report issued by Alchemy.com, web3 developer activity increased by 453% in the year up to Q4 of 2022, with 4.6 million total smart contracts deployed in the period. While funding remained at the top of developers’ minds, tooling services took a close second place.

“Our users tell us that up to 30% of engineering time in web3 is spent on error handling and understanding system data,” says Blocktorch co-founder and CEO Gery Pollak. “What we’re doing is similar to the impact Datadog had on cloud development a decade ago. “Engineers can get all of the essential logs, metrics, and traces they need straight out of the box, without having to build time-consuming in-house tools themselves.”

Pollak says that hundreds of developers have signed up for the service since it launched its alpha version in September 2022. Earlier this month, the beta version was rolled out, with expanded functionality to track more types of data (logs, traces, and metrics), and support the wider architecture stack used by dApps.

On the investment, Speedinvest’s Yang Tran commented, “The number of developers building in the crypto space has increased in the past few years at an unprecedented pace, but developer tooling has not caught up at the same rate. We are more than happy to back the talented team behind Blocktorch in building the observability platform for the decentralised stack, covering all observability pillars and empowering developers to scale every decentralised component globally and serve billions of users reliably.”