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Buildspace raises $10M led by a16z to build Hogwarts for builders and dreamers

Cointime Official

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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