US-based digital asset exchange, Coinbase has reportedly acquired Blockspring, a San Francisco-based firm that develops software for collecting and processing data from APIs.
Coinbase, Blockspring Have The Same Investors
The deal was first announced in an official blog post published by Blockspring (on January 14th) and TechCrunch reportedly confirmed the report by contacting a Coinbase spokesperson.
After starting out as a serverless data management business for corporate clients, Blockspring now also offers services to firms that work with API data. This includes API data management for sales and marketing, generating reports, and building repositories for recruitment and other types of HR services.
According to Crunchbase, Blockspring was founded in 2014 and received funding from venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel. Notably, both these investment firms have also invested in Coinbase. As mentioned in Blockspring’s blog post, the software development firm will join Coinbase’s team, however it will mainly focus on providing services related to its existing products “for current and new customers as they always have.”
$120 Million Acquisition Of Earn.com
Commenting on the acquisition deal, Paul Kalsen, the co-founder and CEO at Blockspring, wrote (in the announcement’s official blog post):
Joining Coinbase was a no-brainer for a number reasons including its commitment to establishing an open financial system and the strength of its engineering team, led by Tim Wagner (formerly of AWS Lambda). Making the technical simple and accessible is what we’ve always been about at Blockspring. And now we’ll get to push these goals forward along with the talented folks at Coinbase to make something greater than we could on our own.
Coinbase has now acquired 11 different companies (including Blockspring). In order to help fund its existing operations and to expand its services, the San Francisco-based exchange has managed to raise $525 million in capital.
One of Coinbase’s largest acquisitions involved a $120 million deal for Earn.com (in April 2018), which is a platform that allows users to earn cryptocurrency for responding to emails and completing routine tasks. Balaji Srinivasan, a co-founder of Earn.com, has been appointed the chief technical officer (CTO) at Coinbase.
Acquiring Keystone Capital, Cipher Browser
Also in April 2018, Coinbase acquired Cipher Browser, an Ethereum blockchain-based app browser and wallet service provider. In June 2018, the American crypto exchange had announced it was looking to acquire Keystone Capital, an important step for Coinbase as it had also revealed its plans to become a licensed broker dealer.
As CryptoGlobe reported in October 2018, Coinbase announced that it had obtained a license under New York State Banking Law to “operate as an independent qualified custodian.” This allows the exchange to provide regulated services for managing its clients’ digital assets.
