The Web3 Growth Landscape: Interactive Map and Database. To add a new company, fill out this form.

Insights TLDR

• $600M+ has been raised by 71 web3 growth startups¹; nearly all are preseed or seed stage
• Messaging, Quests, & Loyalty are the most well-funded categories ($100M+)
• Analytics and Loyalty are the most crowded categories (25+ teams), followed by Community Tooling and Messaging (15+ teams)
• Affiliate / Referrals is the breakout category in H1. There are 2x more companies than at the start of 2023, yet only 1/3 of the companies are VC-backed today. But beware, several teams have pivoted in or expanded their offerings to cover this space.
• There’s a growing subcategory within Attribution / AdTech emerging — data unions helping users monetize their data by selling it to advertisers
• Quests and Ad Networks are increasingly competing for advertising dollars, empowered by the rise of web3 attribution / ad tech
• Discovery is relatively underfunded, yet these companies have the potential to be some of the biggest ad real estate proprietaries in web3 if they invest in long-term growth strategies.

¹ 100+ have raised but their raises have not been disclosed, so the actual figure is likely higher (of the 71 cited, ~20 teams privately shared their raise details with us to be included in this report)

Intro

The 2010s were the golden age of digital marketing. Marketers were empowered with a rich tech stack for measuring ROI, monitoring revenue, & modeling LTV. Naturally, the MarTech landscape grew tremendously over the past decade, from 150 companies in 2011 to 11,000 in 2023:

Chief MarTech’s 2023 Marketing Technology Landscape (source)

Yet by the late 2010s the tides began to turn, sparked by GDPR in 2018, CCPA in 2020, and Google announcing the end of 3rd party cookies in 2021. What had been built to near marketing perfection began to crumble with the turn of the decade.

As web3 emerged in the 2020s, so did a more community and privacy centric marketing environment. Buyer behavior shifted too, with consumers engaging on “dark social” channels like Discord, Telegram, and Reddit which are notoriously difficult to track. This meant that marketers could no longer rely on the targeting methods they’ve used in the past.