Allium Inc., a blockchain data delivery platform for the enterprise, today announced it has raised $16.5 million in early-stage funding led by Theory Ventures to scale out its infrastructure and offer ways for more financial institutions to embrace digital assets.

Existing investors Kleiner Perkins and Amplify Partners also participated in the Series A funding round, which brings the total raised by the company to $21.5 million following the company’s seed round in 2022.

Allium’s platform provides enterprise-grade data solutions for financial institutions and companies so that it can be analyzed and interacted with as readily as possible for applications and reporting.

Although blockchains are indeed distributed ledgers, which should be akin to giant databases, they don’t operate like them. Instead, they are like computers, where recorded transactions are part of complex pieces of software. Standardizing and making sense of blockchain systems requires deep expertise in the technical outputs of smart contracts, tokens, nonfungible tokens, stablecoins and other industries that have been built up on blockchain technology.

“Allium exists to drive trust and transparency in blockchain, to help people understand and build with full confidence,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Ethan Chan. “Currently, something as essential as accurately tracking digital currency volumes requires continually normalizing data across 40-plus blockchain networks and parsing thousands of smart contracts, equating to petabytes of data.”

The company provides blockchain data to its customers through two different application programming interfaces: the Allium Explorer and Allium Developer. The Explorer interface provides query and visualization for data discovery, investment and market research, financial accounting and auditing. The Developer interface provides real-time ingestion tools for high-performance applications.

Allium works with financial tech customers such as Visa Inc. and Stripe Inc., which use the platform for crypto activity, and blockchain companies such as decentralized crypto exchange Uniswap Labs and blockchain wallet Phantom.

The company recently partnered with Visa to provision relevant data for Visa’s launch of the Visa Onchain Analytics Dashboard. The dashboard will start by displaying information on stablecoins, a cryptocurrency that maintains a one-to-one token value with a traditional currencies such as the U.S. dollar. The data types include active users, volumes by coin, transaction sizes and other metrics.

“At Visa, we seek to both better inform our clients of how people and businesses are using stablecoins for transactions that may be outside of crypto trading activity, and also help inform our work with partners to develop products designed to better serve our clients,” said Cuy Sheffield, head of Visa Crypto. “The Visa OnChain Analytics Dashboard is designed to enable our clients to better understand this activity.”

Allium said that it intends to use the new funding to invest further in its data infrastructure to create a better experience for customers. It also plans to build launchpads for financial firms such as payment providers and brokerages looking to engage with digital currencies, virtual assets and tokens.

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