USV: Why we led the investment in Farcaster developer tools Neynar

Author: Nikhil Raman, USV Investment Team Analyst; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou

Last week, Farcaster announced their latest round of financing, and USV (Union Square Ventures) also announced its lead investment (see Jinse Finance’s previous report "Why VCs are optimistic about Farcaster after US$150 million in Series A financing to become a unicorn"). USV has been thinking about and supporting social applications for 20 years. We are very happy to finally see the strong development momentum of such a new social form. It is more open and composable than the previous web2 social, and empowers users and developers. gained more power.

Specifically, we have seen significant growth in users and developers in the Farcaster ecosystem over the past few months, and when we talk to various development teams , we realized that most conversations would eventually bring up Neynar.

Neynar is a set of developer tools that can help developers easily develop and build on social protocols such as Farcaster. These tools include cloud hosting Hub, read and write API, authorization, data flow, managed DB and more. They are ubiquitous in the Farcaster ecosystem, with nearly every application using Neynar in some form.

At USV, we believe that useful infrastructure tends to appear in specific patterns. Specifically, through past observations, we found that applications first bring about infrastructure construction, and the infrastructure in turn supports more new applications.

The experience of Neynar developers Rish and Manan is a good example of this model in practice. They initially tried to build a social application based on Farcaster, but found that the default Farcaster API severely affected the application's performance. As they developed custom tools for Hubs to serve their own applications, they began to realize that there were many other teams facing the same problem and struggling to find solutions. Just like that, Neynar was born.

The on-chain social ecosystem is developing rapidly. Users, open data, open graphs, and seamless composability are attracting more and more developers, kicking off a wave of experimentation. Neynar is driving this rapid pace of development, continuously expanding its product offerings to meet the market's growing needs. It started by helping development teams read and write the Farcaster protocol, and gradually evolved into helping developers authenticate and obtain user authorization.

In January this year, Frames (embeddable mini apps) were released, and Neynar became the preferred tool for developers and creators to create and host frames. As active users grow and new users proliferate, content moderation, user quality, and data transformation become more important, and Neynar has become the home for acquiring and hosting this data and providing simple yet valuable metadata about user reputation.

Through Farcaster, a new, unbundled social landscape is taking shape, and Neynar is helping developers at all levels (such as headless markets, review bots, data platform, reputation protocols, and many new clients) to build new experiences. Neynar is ready to provide full infrastructure support for this.

We are excited to co-lead Neynar’s $11 million Series A financing alongside Haun Ventures.