Yesterday was V-Sum_Eight, which was great. One of the demos was from Alloy. Their product makes it much easier for banks, FinTechs, and others, to validate an end user’s identity. This has a special place in my heart because I’ve experienced the brain damage of solving the problem first hand in a far less elegant way.
Their name has been coming up a lot lately so I was particularly excited to learn more and they did an excellent job with their tech brief. Here it is:
What really got me thinking was about what happened next. Most of us were just consuming the demo and asking questions. Our community has been asking for this demo since the end of last year so I think everyone was doing what I was doing, just learning about the product. The Alloy team did a great job with the questions and today the company announced it raised $100M.
That’s unique for a few reasons to me.
One is that it wasn’t that long ago that there was a really unbelievably sized round. Another is that most of us had no idea and were just enjoying learning about the product. If you’ve ever been a part of a deal like this, you know that by the time the world learns about it you’re probably 6 months into processing the plan even if the cash is fresh. The last in my mind is that people were probably attending that demo who missed out on the deal. They were just supporting the Alloy team anyway with questions and comments.
These are all important from my perspective in FinTech/DeFi/Crypto right now. Rounds are getting bigger and more resources are being put to work. Everyone can’t know everything and even the folks missing rounds aren’t pissed about it. They just want to be there and help!
Despite knowing the world was going to blow up with this announcement the next day the Alloy team just showed up and calmly did a kick ass demo. I respect that.
This feels like a really special time for the industry. Congrats to the Alloy team, clients, and their new partners at Lightspeed.