Tech Startup Blockspring acquired by crypto exchange Coinbase

Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US, took over Blockspring which is a startup supported by Andreessen Horowitz, the Venture Capital firm owned by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The deal was announced by Blockspring on a blog post and was confirmed by a Coinbase representative, TechCrunch.

Blockspring is a startup based out of San Francisco dealing primarily in making of various types of tools that assist developers to process information accumulated from Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Once the startup got a funding of $3.4 Million from Andreessen Horowitz in 2015, it pulled everyone’s attention and started getting public interest.

As per a blog post on the Blockspring website, co-founder, Paul Katsen, declared the acquisition by stating that: “Back in summer 2014, Jason, Don, and I launched a tool for developers to easily build APIs without needing to touch any servers. We didn’t want to spin up and maintain a bunch of Amazon EC2 servers for a project at our old startup, and thought – there must be a better way to develop web services! In hindsight, this stroke of laziness was both too early and too late. Only a few months later, Amazon launched AWS Lambda, effectively kicking off the serverless revolution. We spent months talking to users, staring at data and reports, but couldn’t figure out how to grow metrics in this new world.”

Further stating “It was during an extra long night of exporting reports into Google Sheets that we discovered a pivot for Blockspring – to help get data from APIs into productivity tools. With the proliferation of SaaS and end-user computing, and help from our new co-founder, Jeremy, we pivoted and grew this into a real business for thousands of marketers, recruiters, ops, and salespeople. Today, we want to share some news about the next chapter for Blockspring – the Blockspring team is joining Coinbase.”

Katsen also noted that though he and his team will be joining Coinbase as part of the acquisition, Blockspring will still function as an independent company thereby providing its services to the new and existing customers. He added “Joining Coinbase was a no-brainer for a number reasons including its commitment to establishing an open financial system and the strength of its engineering team, led by Tim Wagner (formerly of AWS Lambda). Making the technical simple and accessible is what we’ve always been about at Blockspring. And now we’ll get to push these goals forward along with the talented folks at Coinbase to make something greater than we could on our own.”

Even after the acquisition the new members can still sign up on Blockspring and use their services in the same manner as before. Further, such acquisition may merge with Coinbase to trademark ‘BUIDL’, a term which the company explained as a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution which is “software for managing, buying, selling, storing, transacting, exchanging, sending and receiving virtual currency.”

Coinbase has been quite optimistic with respect to the crypto market and Blockspring is not the first of the
acquisition by Coinbase exchange. It has been involved in several other acquisitions in the past and the current takeover of Blockspring is the eleventh such acquisition by Coinbase, with one of the prominent acquisition being that of Distributed Systems Inc., another San Francisco-based startup.

The current CTO of Coinbase, Balaji Srinivasan, used to serve on the board of Andreessen Horowitz in 2015 and had been a supporter of the startup. Srinivasan joined Coinbase in 2018 when Coinbase acquired Earn.com.

An employee of Coinbase, Tim Wagner, leading the engineering team sounded very excited about the acquisition and tweeted “Excited to share that the @Blockspring team is joining Coinbase to help build out our developer tools. They’ve built an impressive platform that connects hundreds of different APIs and we’re excited for them to continue their work here at Coinbase!”