Yo! What’s up everyone — Farza here.
As you can tell by the headline, we’re up to some crazy shit as usual lol.
I’ll be honest, it’s pretty wild to get to this point.
I started this company in December 2019 doing something completely different. Originally, it was called “ZipHomeschool” where I was building software to help parents homeschool their kids.
To start the company, I raised $25,000 from Furqan.
It took a lot of people to get to this point. But, let me be real — without Furqan, none of this would have even started. He believed in me back when I barely believed in myself.
After all, it just takes one person to believe you can do it.
It’s been a fkin journey but nearly 3-years, 10 pivots and many highs and lows later, here we are.
Buildspace has become extremely prolific — 10,000s have built in public, 1000s have attended our IRL initiatives, some have started multi-million $ agencies, found co-founders, and even gotten funded for their own startups.
So, what’s new?
TL;DR
We’re profitable off of our sponsorship model.
We continue to be 100% free for users + globally accessible to all.
We’ve had over 125,000 users build with us. A majority of the founders and developers in web3 today got their start at buildspace.
We’re expanding to other domains that will need an influx of really talented builders — starting with ML/AI.
We’re building out a few IRL hubs around the world our alumni can build from — with the first one opening in SF on March 1st, 2023. We plan to expand to different parts of the world so no matter what visa or passport you hold, you’ll be able to build from one of our hubs.
The $10M raise.
I want to thank everyone who participated in this round. $10m is a lot of fucking money. We’re going to put it to good use and build something really big.
Here are all our fantastic partners:
a16z — Connie Chan + Anne Lee Skates
Founders Inc — Furqan Rydhan and Hubert Thieblot
Weekend Fund — Ryan Hoover + Vedika Jain
Y-Combinator
Vayner Fund — Gary Vaynerchuk
Kun Gao — co-founder @ Crunchyroll
Kevin Lin — co-founder @ Twitch
Patrick Lee — co-founder @ Rotten Tomatoes
Holly Liu — co-founder @ Kabam
Amjad Masad — co-founder @ Replit
Dave Nemetz — co-founder @ Bleacher Report
Sieva Kozinsky — co-founder @ Enduring
Balaji Srinivasan — former CTO-Coinbase
Dan Sommer and David Berger — co-founders @ Trilogy Edu
Paul and Chris — co-founders @ CopyAI
John Andrew — founder @ Wander
Dunce Capital — John Danner
Melo7 — Carmelo Anthony
MastryVC — Andre Iguodala
Earl Grey Capital
ShrugVC
Tobenna Arodiogbu — co-founder @ CloudTrucks
David and Abhishek — co-founders @ BetterBrain
Nicolas Chinot — anime partner
Cat Wu — early employee @ Scale
Jason Hitchcock — ex-growth @ Bebo, GP @ 4 Moons
Nu Dao — founder @ Allies
Protocol Labs
OrangeDAO
DreamerVC
We3
Ben Levy — co-founder @ Milk Road
Charlie Holtz — co-founder @ ShlinkedIn
Nick Ducoff — co-founder @ Edmit
Sherwin Gandhi — co-founder @ Jeeves
Romain Huet — ex-Head of Dev Rel @ Stripe
Qasim Munye — co-founder @ ShortlyAI
Solana Ventures
Open Sea Ventures
Alchemy Ventures
Samarth Jajoo — our first intern
Let’s build.(BY Farza Majeed)
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