Alchemy has always sounded like magic, but this story is pure engineering discipline with a sense of humor sharp enough to cut glass. In San Francisco, long before Web3 was a conference circuit and a hoodie uniform, Nikil Viswanathan and Joseph Lau were Stanford teaching assistants who built Down To Lunch on a whim, watched it hit number one in the App Store, then tried to wire blockchain into it and realized the infrastructure underneath was a mess. Nodes crashed. Scale broke. Builders bled time. So instead of complaining, they tore the floor up and started pouring concrete.
That decision in 2017 became Alchemy, now the quiet system running beneath the loudest names in crypto. Seventy percent of top Web3 applications sit on this stack. More than $150 billion in transactions move through it every year. Over 100 million end users across 197 countries never see it, which is the point. Infrastructure only wins when nobody has to think about it.
Nikil Viswanathan runs the company like a product manager who still remembers what it feels like to debug at 2 a.m. Joseph Lau built the reliability like an engineer who hates excuses. Seven years, 99.99 percent uptime, no multi hour incidents. That is not marketing copy. That is muscle memory. When Cortex launched as Alchemy’s intelligent blockchain engine, trained on trillions of historical onchain requests, it did not brag. It just delivered 50 millisecond response times, faster than Visa’s global average, and powered more than 70 percent of stablecoin infrastructure without blinking.
The bench got deeper. Guillaume Poncin arrived from Stripe to scale the technical spine. Bill Platt came in from AWS to run operations with the calm of someone who has already seen the internet break and rebuild itself. Together they are steering a platform that lets developers ship without babysitting nodes, onboard users without seed phrase anxiety, and move value like software instead of ceremony.
Alchemy raised $564 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Silver Lake, Coatue, Pantera and a list of names that reads like a tech hall of fame, but the signal is not the valuation. It is who shows up when things matter. Coinbase. Circle. PayPal. Shopify. Stripe. Robinhood. World Chain. Base. They do not gamble on uptime.
This roundless moment is about tempo. Account Kit smoothing the front door. Rollups letting teams own their own chains. Stablecoins turning into invisible plumbing for global finance. Alchemy is hiring, building, and quietly deciding how fast a billion people can move onchain, and who gets there first.
