Coinbase is poised to revolutionize its own business model; from expanding its portfolio of alt coins to making interesting, strategic acquisitions. The most recent one is an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup acquisition.
The startup in question is called Blockspring. The company makes tools for managing and collecting data from APIs. While the deal’s value has not been disclosed, Blockspring announced the acquisition through a blog post.
Blockspring started as a company that provides serverless data to businesses, but pivoted to a startup that processes and collects data from APIs. The acquisition made by Coinbase is reportedly due to a “talent hunt”. The investors that have backed up Blockspring include Andreessen Horowitza, Y Combinator and SV Angel. Some of these are Coinbase investors, as well. So the synergy here seems to be more of a talent/strategic one.
While Blockspring’s team will be joining Coinbase’s, the startup will continue to offers its own services to customers.
According to Tech Crunch, the CEO of Blockspring, Mr. Paul Katsen commented on the acquisition:
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.
With the acquisition complete, Coinbase has now closed 11 acquisitions in total. With the growth of the cryptocurrency market, and the emergence of indirect and direct competitors, such as Robinhood, Coinbase is apparently making some serious efforts to stay on top of its game, both in technical and “talent” terms.