Nikil Viswanathan has said that Alchemy was actually his team's sixteenth pivot. By his own telling, they had spent about nine years on startups with little to show for it before 2021.
One of them nearly made it. Down To Lunch, a social app he co-founded around 2016, began as a Sunday afternoon project. The first version was built in a single night, with deliberate technical debt so it could ship at once. It solved a personal itch: meeting friends spontaneously after leaving the dorm. Social media reviews spread it. Then, in under 48 hours, the app reportedly lost 90 percent of its growth. The team had also dressed up as Berkeley students to get feedback and recoded around what they heard.
The first version was built in a single night, with deliberate technical debt so it could ship at once.
He has said on a podcast that he grew up in a small Texas town few people have heard of. A data-broker-style bio says Lubbock, which should be treated cautiously. He studied computer science at Stanford for both degrees. There he met Joe Lau, with whom he co-taught an online database course.
By 2017 the two had a new angle. Ethereum had shown what Web3 could be, but building on it was painful, Greylock says. A developer had to run servers just to read the chain. Alchemy offered to run them. The pitch became the AWS for blockchains.
What almost nobody saw coming was the speed. After years of near-misses, the 2021 boom sent builders to Alchemy. $80 million at a $505 million valuation in April 2021, $250 million at $3.5 billion in October, then $200 million at $10.2 billion in February 2022. A Stanford summary of his 2023 talk says it went from public launch to a $10 billion valuation in 16 months. Adobe and OpenSea were customers.
The cost was a market cycle. The sources read contain no valuation news after February 2022, so $10.2 billion is a high-water mark, now about 33 months old. In 2026 the company hired an AWS veteran, Bill Platt, as COO, and tear-sheet data put headcount at 384.
For a first-time founder, the number to notice is not ten billion. It is sixteen. Viswanathan did not find the idea once. He went through fifteen versions that did not work, including one that briefly took off and then slid in two days, and he did it alongside a partner from Stanford. The fortune arrived late, and it arrived to people who were still there.