Samir Arora spent a decade at Apple. Beginning in the early 1980s, he worked on developing graphical user interfaces and the Lisa and Macintosh computers, and then focused on building platforms for developers. By the mid-1990s, he co-founded NetObjects, an early website building tool that was acquired by IBM in 1997.
He's still building things.
On Thursday, he announced a $10 million Series A round for Kyro Digital, a San Francisco-based web3 native development platform he co-founded last year with Peter Leeb, Darshana Munde, Liz Thompson, Arfat Allarakha and Muoi Lam. Arora is the CEO.
The round was backed not only by several venture capital firms but also four companies that are building out blockchain protocols: Avalanche, Polygon, Rally and Tezos.
Venture funding came from Decasonic, Drive Capital, Fenbushi Capital, Information Capital, Signum Capital, UOB Venture Management, Woodside Incubator and Brad Koenig, the former head of Goldman Sachs' global technology division. Koenig also joined Kyro's board of directors.
Web3 is an emerging ecosystem built on decentralized blockchain protocols, and it takes specialized technical knowledge to build websites and applications for it. Kyro is trying to make it easier for people to build native web3 apps.
"We're in that phase of web3 where the fundamentals are in place but its full definition and all the words are not there," Arora told me, but "the fundamental change in web3 from web2 starts in the technology stack from the bottom up."
The internet as we know it is built like a "web" — a network of connected computers — but web3 starts on a bottom layer, namely blockchain technology that creates a highly decentralized infrastructure.
And similar to how Apple develops proprietary applications for its operating systems as well as being open to third-party developers, Kyro will be involved in building out its own applications, has created a native web3 wallet and will also participate in creating tokens for web3 projects.
"We offer the ability, when you create or use any of the web3 assets, the ability for you to create real life applications and use them for either sales or bundling," Arora said. That could range from memberships to private events or games, communications, sales and rewards.
And the company's services can be integrated into other third-party software. It's kind of like Stripe for web3.
"We've created a layer in which you can say, 'I want to mint an NFT,' and you can choose which of our supported chains you want to mint it on," Arora said. "It fully integrates with their system, including payments and their wallets or our custodial wallet."
The company is partnering with several protocols to provide multichain support including Avalanche, Ethereum, Flow, Polygon, Rally and Tezos.
It's a SaaS platform but also takes a percentage of transactions and anticipates generating additional revenue from crypto token projects. The platform is already generating revenue.
The company doesn't have a sales team, Arora told me, but he wants to scale up the team to between 50 and 100 people this year with a focus on hiring engineers, business developers and product managers. They'll get partially paid in cryptocurrency, too.
Arora told me that 20% of their salaries are paid in crypto. That creates a new challenge, though: how to handle payroll.
"We're looking at how do we send part of our payroll as crypto. There's no Salesforce, there's nothing today at the level of Salesforce. For us, the three things we can do is: find a company that already exists; number two, partner with companies like Salesforce and bring them into our platform so that their apps will be fully integrated and they have a very strong ecosystem of platforms in both directions; and the third would be, in the absence of someone else building it, if we have a large enough need for it, we'll build it," Arora said. "We know there's a need and I think we'll end up doing a combination of two of those."
