Coinbase acquihires San Francisco startup Blockspring

NelsonG · January 17, 2019

Coinbase is continuing its push to suck up talent after the $8 billion-valued crypto business snapped up Blockspring, a San Francisco-based startup that enables developers to collect and process data from APIs.

The undisclosed deal was announced by Blockspring on its blog, and confirmed to TechCrunch by a Coinbase representative. Coinbase declined to comment further.

Blockspring started out as a serverless data business, but it pivoted into a service that lets companies use API data. That includes purposes such as building list and repositories for recruitment, marketing sales, reporting and more. Pricing starts from $29 per month and Blockspring claims to work with “thousands” of companies.

That startup graduated Y Combinator and, according to Crunchbase, it had raised $3.5 million from investors that include SV Angel and A16z, both of which are Coinbase investors. Those common investors are likely a key reason for the deal, which appears to be a talent acquisition. The Blockspring team will join Coinbase, but it will continue to offer its existing products “for current and new customers as they always have.”

“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,” wrote CEO Paul Katsen.

Coinbase raised $300 million last October to take it to $525 million raised to date from investors. While it may not be a huge one, the Blockspring deal looks to be its eleventh acquisition, according to data from Crunchbase. Most of those have been talent grabs, but its more substantial pieces of M&A have included the $120 million-plus deal for Earn.com, which installed Balaji Srinivasan as the company’s first CTO, the acquisition of highly-rated blockchain browser Cipher, and the purchase of securities dealer Keystone Capital, which boosted its move into security tokens.

In addition to buying up companies, Coinbase also makes investments via its early-stage focused Coinbase Ventures fund.

Disclosure: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.