Mo Hallaba for Datawisp

Data analysis for the metaverse.

March was a great month for Datawisp:

• Raised a pre-seed round from some great investors (more below)
• Web3 (Solana) integration complete (and demoed live at the Solana NYC Hacker House event)
• Huge market opportunity becoming more obvious
• Some bigger BD initiatives
• Growing list of beta partners

Looking ahead, we're focused on:

• Fixing things that can be easily fixed with money (e.g. our awful website that I built)
• Incorporating more client feedback into the product
• Converting our huge pipeline (from NY Hacker House and GDC) into actual clients
• Leveraging our new investors' connections to get more traction (already talking to a couple of game studios this way)
• Raising a $3-5M seed in the coming months (already having exploratory conversations) so we can start hiring the team we need to take Datawisp to the next level

Last month we announced we were raising a $400k pre-seed and we actually managed to get everything done within the month (and $35k over). We're excited to welcome our new investors onboard:

• Play Ventures
• Jabre Capital Partners
• Joe Zhou
• Angelo Cazzola
• David Chen

In the last update we mentioned working on web3 connectivity. It's done. In about 4 days, Noah managed to add Solana as a supported data source, and we even did a live, working demo at the Solana Hacker House in NYC. Streamflow volunteered to be our guinea pig, and we were able to import their data and show how many payment streams were created each day with just a few clicks.



Program ID + IDL is what you need to get started. Once those are in, on-chain data from Solana shows up in the form of this data block (like all other data) and can be used / combined with other data sources to do any analysis. But it has this little Solana logo just to let you know where it came from!



Obviously it's still early and there are things that we can do to make the whole experience easier for end-users (like not requiring them to manually copy/paste their IDL) but for now it works and it's good enough to get us more clients (more on this below).

We're up to about 10 or 11 closed beta partners (depending on when this goes out). Added a couple of games and a defi company mentioned above (Streamflow). We're also working on some really cool BD initiatives + still following up with people from the NY Solana event and GDC.

Some highlights:

• Magic Eden (largest NFT marketplace on Solana) approached us about partnering to help game devs (presumably to compete against Fractal, a gaming focused newcomer)
• Chatting with Pragma, Accelbyte, Lootcrate, Edgegap, and more "backend as a service" providers to put Datawisp in the hands of their customers

Going into next month, we're not trying to double/triple the number of partners but rather start creating case studies to build marketing materials out of. Bringing on clients one by one isn't scalable forever, but demonstrating value and using that to market our business is.

We're finding a lot of success specifically with Web3 games and Defi projects. We think this is for a few reasons:

• Combining on/off chain data: Datawisp makes it really easy to work with multiple data sources and allows for a variety of them within the same sheet. This means a game can tie their NFT sales (e.g. from Solana) to their in-game activity (e.g. from Unreal Engine, through a MySQL database), or a Defi protocol can match their activity with external factors like interest rates and other economic indices.
• Custom analysis: Most web3 focused platforms tend to work like Google Analytics, providing easy to use pre-packaged metrics, and tend to focus on NFTs collections. Datawisp lets you build any query completely from scratch. Both Games and Defi rely on very specific, and varied (by game, by protocol, etc.) metrics that Datawisp allows them to look at.

We actually talked to two companies last week that were building their own in-house analytics because they couldn't find anything else that they liked. One of them is now using Datawisp; the other's a work in progress but we think we can get there with them!

With our Solana integration complete, the strategy between now and our seed round is to corner the Solana Games / Defi market and get as many clients as possible. We think it's a good way to build a user base and their feedback will help us make the platform better for everyone, not just those building on Solana.

We don't yet have the runway to hire for all these positions, but we're starting to be on the lookout for anyone that could be a good fit:

• UI/UX - part time okay
• Graphic designer - part time okay
• Front-end dev
• Full-stack dev
• Bizdev
• Marketing - part time okay

Our goal is to identify as many of these people in the next couple of months while we line up our seed round so we can hire them as soon as possible. If you know anyone that might be a fit please let us know!

• Intros to good potential hires (see above).
• Intros to investors who are big on data, web3, and/or gaming and would write a $500k-$2M check in a seed round.

Big shout out to all our existing investors for believing in us and helping us get to this point: Anna and Alex, Sree, Carrie, and Brandon. Thank you!

Also, shout out to Sid, a fellow Techstars alum and startup CEO who's been really helpful since we launched Datawisp in late November (and even before that).