The blockchain indexing platform raised seed funding after winning hackathons and receiving grants from ecosystem foundations.

Early users were developers building decentralized applications on Polkadot and other networks.

Startup Rollercoaster

The Spark

Co-founders Sam Zou (CEO) and Ian He (CTO) came from Centrality/CENNZnet. In 2019, Ian He’s team won second place at the first Substrate/Polkadot Hackathon, sparking interest in their indexing technology. In December 2020, SubQuery also secured a Web3 Foundation grant to accelerate its open-source SDK development.

The Peak

SubQuery launched its data indexing service, enabling developers to query blockchain data more efficiently. It quickly gained adoption in the Polkadot ecosystem, with projects such as Acala and Moonbeam using it. By 2021, SubQuery was serving millions of daily queries across more than 60 projects in Polkadot and Kusama.

The Drop

Competition among indexing and blockchain data infrastructure protocols is intense. Building a sustainable business model around open-source tools and hosted services remains challenging. SubQuery also faces the complexity of decentralizing its network while keeping performance and developer trust.

The Reset

On 12 March 2021, SubQuery raised US$1.8 million in a seed round, backed by investors including DeFi Alliance, Hypersphere Ventures, D1 Ventures, Digital Finance Group, and The LAO. This followed the Web3 Foundation grant and allowed the team to expand support beyond Polkadot and introduce hosted services alongside its open-source offering.

The Discipline

The team invested heavily in developer documentation, SDK tooling, and community education. They leaned into ecosystem partnerships, secured further foundation funding and grants, and began preparing for a decentralized governance model.

The Climb

On 8 September 2021, SubQuery raised US$9 million in a Series A/SAFT round, led by Arrington Capital, Digital Currency Group (DCG), and Stratos Technologies, with participation from NGC, Hypersphere, Wintermute, and others. This brought total funding to around US$10.8 million. Funds were used to expand multi-chain support, pursue enterprise use cases, and advance decentralization.

Read more

• https://subquery.network/about
• https://subquery.medium.com/subquery-raises-1-8m-seed-round-for-future-expansion-3348c1f2a931
• https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210908005482/en/SubQuery-Announces-US%249-Million-Funding-Round-For-Decentralized-Data-Protocol-For-The-Polkadot-Ecosystem
• https://cointelegraph.com/news/subquery-raises-9m-for-polkadot-data-protocol
• https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/09/08/subquery-gets-9m-in-series-a-to-improve-access-to-blockchain-data-on-polkadot

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