Blockworks raises at $192M valuation with 20 customers investing alongside VCs

Blockworks raises at $192M valuation with 20 customers investing alongside VCs

Blockworks, the crypto-focused media and data company, has raised a new round at a $192M valuation, led by SoFi and Reciprocal, with Coinbase Ventures among the co-investors. The standout detail is that 20 customer companies also participated, including founders and operators from Solana, Kraken, and Canto — firms that use Blockworks' products daily and now hold equity in the business.

“We just raised at a $192,000,000 valuation. So Fi and reciprocal led the round. Bunch of folks invested. Coinbase Ventures... probably the coolest thing from the round is 20 of our customers also put in money. So founders, operators from Solana, Kraken, Canton, all these great crypto companies who use our product every day, and now they wanna own a piece of the company.”

From bootstrap to data platform

Yanowitz built Blockworks without outside capital from its 2017 founding, reaching $25M in revenue while profitable. The original thesis was that institutional investors — family offices, pensions, endowments — would eventually enter crypto and need something closer to S&P, Dow Jones, or Bloomberg than what existed. Blockworks started at the top of the information stack: media, podcasts, and events, which it used to own the audience before building data products underneath.

The event business started with a six-to-nine PM gathering in a Chinatown venue with a leaking ceiling, generating roughly $10,000 in revenue. Podcast distribution followed a similar pattern: Blockworks initially partnered with known crypto personalities including Anthony Pompliano and Charlie Shrem to build listenership, then cut external shows once it had sufficient audience to run its own IP. The network now claims roughly 15 to 20 million listeners per year, which Yanowitz says makes it the third-largest financial podcast network in the world.

Recurring revenue shift

The fundraise is tied to a deliberate pivot away from advertising. Two years ago, recurring revenue was around 5% of the total. Last year it reached roughly 30%. This year Blockworks expects to cross 50% recurring, a threshold that made the round easier to price at a software-adjacent multiple rather than a media one.

Regulation as a product driver

Yanowitz is direct about the regulatory tailwind. The proposed Clarity Act, which would mandate disclosures for token issuers, is potentially transformative for Blockworks because the company already operates what it describes as the largest token disclosures platform in the industry. Yanowitz compares its filings format — a "B-1" and "B-2" — to the SEC's S-1 and 10-Q. If Clarity passes, mandatory disclosures across all token projects would make that platform effectively a compliance utility.

Two-speed crypto market

Yanowitz frames the current environment as a K-shaped split. Institutional crypto has never been stronger — JPMorgan is moving into tokenization and custody — while token markets are down sharply, with some assets off 95%. Pre-seed and seed venture, once a quick path to raising $10M on a token announcement, has also dried up. His read is that after fifteen-plus years, crypto is entering a consolidation phase where late-stage companies with real revenue are pulling away from the rest.

On AI-crypto convergence, Yanowitz is skeptical of near-term product-market fit from purpose-built intersections, but says Blockworks itself is an AI beneficiary internally: 70% of its code is now AI-generated, shipping velocity is up four to five times versus last year, and token spend in the last three months equals 50% of the company's total AI spend in its entire history.