The Coinbase Mafia

Ivelina
July 21, 2023
Tech Mafias

Company "mafias" are all the rage, and we here at PIN love to dig deep into the most influential 'Tech Mafias,' especially since we're huge on democratizing access to startup investing by supporting communities with all the legal and bureaucratic work when it comes to setting up a community investment club.

The Coinbase Mafia has a total of 60 companies founded and $557 million raised. Many of the companies founded are naturally, in the web3 space. We've grouped the "rising stars" in a separate section below.

If you missed our previous posts, make sure to check the Twitter Mafia, Lyft Mafia, Stripe Mafia, Netflix Mafia, InstaCart Mafia, Dropbox Mafia, Revolut Mafia,Tesla Mafia,Square Mafia, Reddit Mafia, VMware Mafia, Amazon Mafia, SpaceX, Slack Mafia, OpenAI,Google Mafia, Pinterest Mafia and Shopify Mafia articles. Investing in fellow coworkers' startups, especially as a community or alumni group, is one of the best ways to get in early on deals as well as support the ideas and ventures of people you love and admire. Who knows what's around the corner in your own network and community!

Companies covered:

  • Magic Eden
  • Untapped
  • Sardine
  • Slingshot Finance
  • Goldfinch
  • Polychain
  • Foxglove
  • Echovox
  • RiskHarbor
  • Cypher Wallet
  • Storepath
  • Dynaboard
  • Scale3 Labs
  • Centre Pixel
  • Slide
  • Gym Class
  • Turnkey
  • Dharma
  • Rated

Magic Eden

Founder: Zhuoxun Yin
Coinbase Role: Senior Product Manager
Capital Raised: $170M
Investors: Sequoia Capital
Stage: Series B

Magic Eden is a leading NFT marketplace and multi-chain NFT platform.

Untapped

Founder: Tariq Meyers
Coinbase Role: Head of Employee Support Task Force
Capital Raised: $82.7M 
Investors: Sequoia Capital
Stage: Series C

Tariq is an entrepreneur and advocates for civil rights and social justice. Through his career, Tariq has helped build safe spaces for self and agency, and has empowered people to gain equitable access to economic growth, democracy, healthcare, and most importantly, opportunities. Untapped is a diversity recruiting platform that helps companies hire diverse teams.

Sardine

Founder: Soups Ranjan
Coinbase Role: Director of Data Science & Risk
Capital Raised: $75.6M
Investors: FJ Labs
Stage: Series B

Sardine is on a mission to make payments instant and risk-free so consumers and businesses can move money confidently.

Slingshot Finance

Founder: Clinton Bembry
Coinbase Role: Software Engineer
Capital Raised: $23.3M
Investors: Ribbit Capital
Stage: Series A

Slingshot Finance is a fintech company that offers a next-generation decentralized trading platform. It is the Web3 way to buy, sell, and swap over 40k cryptocurrencies at the best prices, with 0% swap fees.

Goldfinch

Founder: Mike Sall, Blake West
Coinbase Role: Head of Product Analytics, Senior Backend Engineer
Capital Raised: $37.7
Investors: a16z
Stage: Series A

Goldfinch is a global decentralized credit protocol. It is a credit platform that offers crypto loans without collateral. Mike and Blake are also the co-founders of Warbler Labs.

Polychain Capital

Founder: Olaf Carlson-Wee
Coinbase Role: Head of Risk & Product Manager
Capital Raised: $10M
Investors: Andreessen Horowitz
Stage: Seed

Polychain Capital is the world’s premier digital asset investment fund. They invest in protocols and companies in the blockchain space, advancing the global adoption of cryptocurrencies.

Linear

Founder: Karri Saarinen, Jori Lallo
Coinbase Role: Head of Design, Software Engineer
Capital Raised: $17.2M
Investors: Sequoia Capital
Stage: Series A

Founded in 2019, Linear is building an issue tracking and project management tool that combines UI elegance with world-class performance.

Foxglove

Founder: Adrian Macneil, Roman Shtylman
Coinbase Role: Director of Engineering, Software Engineer
Capital Raised: $18.7M
Investors: Amplify Partners
Stage: Series A

Foxglove Studio is an open source visualization and diagnosis platform, specifically designed for working with robotics and sensor data. It allows you to easily inspect sensor inputs such as images, point clouds, and time series data, via a highly customizable 2D & 3D environment.

Echovox

Founder: David Marcus
Coinbase Role: Member Board Of Directors
Capital Raised: $12.5M
Investors: Newbury Ventures
Stage: Series B

David’s specialities are in Mobile, Payments, Consumer Internet and Technology. He founded Echovox which is a mobile monetization company focused on monetizing web and traditional media audiences with transaction-enabled mobile services.

Rising Stars

RiskHarbor

Founder: Raouf Ben-Har, Drew Patel
Coinbase Role: Associate Product Manager, Software Engineer Intern
Capital Raised: $3.5M
Investors: Bain Capital Ventures
Stage: Seed

RiskHarbor is the risk management marketplace for digital assets that utilises a completely automated, transparent, and impartial invariant detection mechanism to secure users against blockchain risks, hacks, and attacks.

Cypher Wallet

Founder: Kuberan Marimuthu
Coinbase Role: Engineering Manager
Capital Raised: $4.3M
Investors: Y Combinator
Stage: Seed

Existing crypto wallets are too geeky for mainstream users. Cypher Wallet is a multi-chain crypto wallet simplifying user experience for the mainstream users along with a crypto card.

Storepath

Founder: Namrata Ganatra
Coinbase Role: Senior Director of Engineering
Capital Raised: $3.2M
Investors: Fika Ventures
Stage: Seed

Namrata has experience working on a wide range of technology stack, leading and managing large engineering teams. Storepath is an AI-driven platform that enables e-commerce businesses to grow.

Dynaboard

Founder: Alexander Kern
Coinbase Role: Senior Software Engineer, Blockchain Technical Lead
Capital Raised: $6.6M
Investors: General Catalyst
Stage: Seed

Dynaboard reimagines web application development and extends it beyond the text editor, with real-time code collaboration tools, optimized UI/UX components, database and app integrations, and built-in performance and security best practices.

Scale3 Labs

Founder: Ola Muse, Karthik Kalyanaraman
Coinbase Role: Director of Engineering, Crypto
Capital Raised: $5.3M
Investors: Redpoint
Stage: Seed

Scale3 is a web3 infrastructure company building developer tools. Their inaugural product, Autopilot, is a platform for monitoring and maintaining your blockchain nodes and networks.

Center Pixel

Founder: Omar Bohsali
Coinbase Role: Engineering Manager
Capital Raised: $11M
Investors: Founders Fund
Stage: Seed

Omar previously worked as an entrepreneur in residence at Paradigm. Center is an API for NFT metadata.

Slide

Founder: Teymour S. Farman-Farmaian
Coinbase Role: Product
Capital Raised: $12.3M
Investors: Outlander VC
Stage: Seed

Slide allows web3 apps to serve experiences as easy as web2 . Their “user stack” lets dapps reach larger audiences with credit card purchases of NFTs/crypto, email-based wallets, gasless and batched transactions, and more.

Gym Class

Founder: Paul Katsen
Coinbase Role:
Product
Capital Raised: $8M
Investors: Y Combinator
Stage: Seed

Gym Class is the most popular sports experience in virtual reality, and the best-rated experience overall on the Meta Quest.

Turnkey

Founder: Jack Kearney, Bryce Ferguson
Coinbase Role: Engineer, Product
Capital Raised: $7.5M
Investors: Sequoia Capital
Stage: Seed

Turnkey is a private key infrastructure provider that offers secure APIs to manage private keys. Jack was previously a scout at Sequoia Capital where as Jack was the CTO at Polychain Capital.

Dharma

Founder: Nadav Hollander
Coinbase Role: Software Engineer
Capital Raised: $7.1M
Investors: Y Combinator
Stage: Series A

Dharma is the easiest place to borrow and lend cryptocurrencies instantly and securely.

Rated

Founder: Elias Simos
Coinbase Role: Protocol Specialist
Capital Raised: $2.5M
Investors: Semantic Ventures
Stage: Seed

Rated offers data on validators and node operators, which makes it easier for users to compare and contrast their performance.

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