A San Francisco startup that's backed by Salesforce and building Web3 analytics software announced a seed round extension on Wednesday, more than doubling its total funding.
Mnemonic raised an additional $6 million in an extension round that was led by Salesforce Ventures, bringing its total funding to $10 million. Other investors in the new round were Polygon Ventures, Orange DAO, FIN Capital and FJ Labs.
The seed extension actually closed a year ago in July and valued the company at $32 million, according to PitchBook.
Mnemonic didn't respond to a request for comment but said in a press release that Salesforce would add the company to its list of vendors.
"With the integration of Mnemonic's insights into Salesforce Web3, we can help customers make better data-driven decisions on critical aspects such as partner selection, Web3 product pricing, and audience targeting for airdrops," the co-founder of Salesforce's Web3 Studio, Max Comparetto, said in the release.
Mnemonic was co-founded in 2021 by CEO Andrii Yasinetsky, Chief AI officer Elena Ilkonomovska, Ben Metcalfe and Denys Nevozhai. They announced an initial $4 million of funding in December that year, just months before the crypto and Web3 industries entered into a so-called "winter," and right before interest rate increases and economic uncertainty triggered a broader venture capital pullback.
Earlier this year, former Meta and PayPal executive David Marcus warned that the crypto winter might not thaw until 2025. Marcus oversaw Facebook's digital coin and wallet, dubbed Novi, but left the social media giant in 2021 when that project shut down. He now works at Lightspark Group, a Los Angeles-based cryptocurrency payments startup.
In April, a Salesforce executive also warned that the rest of the year would likely be challenging for the Web3 industry because businesses aren't spending much on Web3 right now, despite a lot of activity happening in the background from investors and founders.
"A few startups are probably going to die because right now they're doing stuff for free in Web3 and they're not going to survive very long. On top of it, some companies that were valued at a very high price are not going to be able to raise money at the same level," Salesforce Senior Vice President Marc Mathieu said during a conference sponsored by CoinDesk. "I'm a huge believer that as we go into 2024 … there is gonna be a lot of upside … and companies that have continued to build the infrastructure will be there ready for the next phase."
Venture capital funding for Web3 companies exploded at the beginning of 2021 and began to steadily decline by early 2022, according to Crunchbase data. Funding peaked in the last quarter of 2022 when companies raised more than $10 billion, and only $3.4 billion has been raised so far in the first half of 2023.
