Stanford Grads Get School’s Backing for Blockchain Startup

(Bloomberg) -- Stanford University and Silicon Valley luminaries are joining forces to back Alchemy, a two-year-old blockchain company.

Alchemy, founded by Stanford graduates Nikil Viswanathan and Joe Lau, has raised $15 million from investors including their alma mater as well as LinkedIn Corp. co-founder Reid Hoffman, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and financier Charles Schwab, the San Francisco-based startup said Tuesday in a statement. The company declined to say how much it’s worth based on the Series A funding round.

Chris Kelly, the former Facebook Inc. legal chief who is one of Alchemy’s investors and is involved in the social media giant’s Libra cryptocurrency project, said he expects Alchemy to be a major player.

“Blockchain has taken off,” Kelly said in a phone interview. “Everybody is focused on cryptocurrencies, but the real use here is for blockchain to effectively distribute trust -- with provable transactions and provable contracts. So being the infrastructure for that, I think they’re setting themselves up for great success.”

While companies such as Walmart Inc. have started using blockchain technology, it still hasn’t been widely embraced by the general public. Alchemy’s customers include blockchain gaming website CryptoKitties and prediction-market platform Augur, according to its website.

Blockchain’s Future

Whether it eventually does catch on more broadly is “the $1 million question,” said Arthur Carvalho, assistant professor of information systems and analytics at Miami University in Ohio. “Do we need blockchain?”

Alchemy is banking on it.

“In the ’70s and ’80s only researchers used computers and today everyone uses a computer,” Lau said in a phone interview, adding the same was true in the early days of the internet.

“We want to be the Microsoft for blockchain,” Viswanathan said.

The two men previously collaborated to create a social-networking app for college students called Down to Lunch, which lets people invite all of their friends to lunch at the same time.

To contact the reporter on this story: Sophie Alexander in New York at salexander82@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Pierre Paulden at ppaulden@bloomberg.net, Peter Eichenbaum, Steven Crabill

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