Thirdweb

Web3 developer platform founded in 2021 by Furqan Rydhan, Jake Loo, and Steven Bartlett.⁸ The company provides SDKs and smart contracts for building blockchain applications, and has raised $29M across two rounds at a $160M valuation.⁹ Founders, Inc. is an investor.⁸

Origins

Rydhan and Loo had both worked at Bebo; Rydhan was also the founding CTO of AppLovin.¹ After Twitch acquired Bebo in 2019, Loo began building side projects with blockchain technology and connected with Rydhan and Bartlett.³ Bartlett had founded Social Chain and hosted the Diary of a CEO podcast.¹³

"We saw what hard work it was to build the application from the ground up," Bartlett told TechCrunch. He compared the problem to the early web, when developers had to code everything themselves before tools like Stripe simplified common features.² "We started with a base set of ideas, and over the course of a year, built out Thirdweb," Rydhan said. "Like the way Stripe made it easy to plug in, our code is similar, but we wrote it to give to everyone."¹

Thirdweb launched publicly in September 2021 with free, no-code tools for building NFT drops, DAOs, token marketplaces, and Web3 games.¹¹⁰

Funding

In December 2021 the company closed a $5M seed round from Gary Vaynerchuk, Mark Cuban, Christian Angermayer, and Imran Khan and Qiao Wang of DeFi Alliance.¹¹⁰³

On August 24, 2022, thirdweb announced a $24M Series A at a $160M valuation, led by Haun Ventures (founded by ex-a16z partner Katie Haun), with Coinbase Ventures, Shopify, and Polygon participating.⁷² The round brought total funding to $29M.⁹ Other investors across both rounds include Founders, Inc. and Catena Capital.⁹

Thirdweb charged no fees at the time of its Series A.²

Product

The platform provides pre-built and modular smart contracts, multi-language SDKs (React, React Native, TypeScript, Python, Go, and Unity), wallet infrastructure supporting in-app wallets and social logins, and deployment tools for 2,000+ EVM-compatible chains.⁸³

By August 2022 — nine months after its public launch — 55,000 developers had used thirdweb and 150,000 smart contracts had been deployed across six blockchains, with Polygon as the most popular chain. Projects built on the platform were collectively generating $1.5M in weekly revenue, though thirdweb itself took no cut.² By March 2023 the platform had 50,000 monthly active developers, 200,000+ deployed contracts across eight blockchains, and 500,000 monthly blockchain transactions.³

Coinbase was both an investor and a product partner: thirdweb provided the development platform for creators building NFTs on Coinbase NFT.² A GamingKit built in collaboration with Coinbase targeted Web3 game developers.³ The company's smart contracts are open-source on GitHub.⁸

Security incident (December 2023)

On November 20, 2023, thirdweb's auditing partner 0xMacro notified the company of a vulnerability in the combination of two open-source standards — ERC-2771 (meta-transactions) and Multicall (batch processing) — used in many of its pre-built smart contracts.⁴ The flaw allowed attackers to spoof sender addresses via malicious calldata in forwarded requests, potentially enabling unauthorized actions including taking control of assets.⁴

Thirdweb publicly disclosed the vulnerability on December 4, 2023.⁶ Affected contracts included DropERC20, ERC721, ERC1155, and AirDrop20.⁶ The company identified eight other protocols using the same vulnerable combination and alerted them.⁴

The engineering team built a mitigation tool that allowed contract owners to either upgrade their contracts (for upgradeable contracts) or lock and migrate to new contracts. By December 8, over 9,800 smart contracts had been mitigated across 37 chains.⁴ Two cases of exploitation were confirmed.⁵

OpenSea and Coinbase both publicly acknowledged the issue and coordinated with thirdweb on affected collections.⁶ In response, thirdweb doubled its bug bounty payouts from $25,000 to $50,000.⁶

Nebula and AI tools

In January 2025 thirdweb launched Nebula, an AI model for interacting with blockchain data across 2,500+ EVM blockchains.¹¹ Nebula can access live and historical on-chain data and execute transactions through natural language prompts.¹¹

Jake Loo stepped down as CTO after more than four years. Under his tenure, the organization grew to over 50 people.¹² Rydhan continues as CEO. The team as of 2026 is approximately 15.⁸

References

1. Gary Vaynerchuk, Mark Cuban back web3 project tool Thirdweb — TechCrunch(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
2. Thirdweb raises $24M at a $160M valuation from Haun Ventures, Shopify and Coinbase — TechCrunch(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
3. thirdweb, equipping creators and entrepreneurs with the tools to build Web3 products — Maddyness UK(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
4. Security Vulnerability Incident Report 12/8 — thirdweb blog(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
5. Smart contract security vulnerability 12/4 — thirdweb blog(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
6. Web3 firm Thirdweb discloses major vulnerability in common open-source NFT library — SiliconANGLE(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
7. Haun Ventures leads $24M Series A for Web3 platform Thirdweb — Fortune(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
8. thirdweb — Founders, Inc. Portfolio(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
9. thirdweb 2026 Company Profile: Valuation, Funding & Investors — PitchBook(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
10. Thirdweb Raises $5M for its No-Code Platform That Seeks to Power Web3 — AlleyWatch(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
11. Introducing Nebula: A powerful AI model to read, write and reason onchain — thirdweb blog(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
12. Jake Loo LinkedIn post — stepping down from thirdweb(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
13. Steven Bartlett (businessman) — Wikipedia(accessed Apr 17, 2026)