Last week, Farcaster announced their latest financing and USV announced its participation. As that blog post notes, USV has been thinking about and supporting social applications for two decades and we are incredibly excited to finally see real momentum around a new social fabric that is more open, composable, and empowering for users and developers than its web2 predecessors. Specifically, the last few months have been marked by significant user and developer growth in the Farcaster ecosystem, and, as we talked to teams, we realized that most roads led back to one company, Neynar.

Neynar is a suite of developer tools that make it easy to build on top of social protocols like Farcaster and others. These tools include cloud hosted hubs, read and write APIs, authorization, data pipelines, hosted DBs, and more. They have become ubiquitous in the Farcaster ecosystem with virtually every application utilizing Neynar in some form. At USV, we believe that useful infrastructure tends to emerge in a particular pattern. Specifically, we’ve historically observed it is apps first that beget infrastructure, which in turn enables new apps. Rish and Manan’s journey is a great example of this pattern in practice. They were initially building a social application on top of Farcaster and found their performance meaningfully hamstrung by the default Farcaster APIs. As they built custom tooling for

Last week, Farcaster announced their latest financing and USV announced its participation. As that blog post notes, USV has been thinking about and supporting social applications for two decades and we are incredibly excited to finally see real momentum around a new social fabric that is more open, composable, and empowering for users and developers than its web2 predecessors. Specifically, the last few months have been marked by significant user and developer growth in the Farcaster ecosystem, and, as we talked to teams, we realized that most roads led back to one company, Neynar.

Neynar is a suite of developer tools that make it easy to build on top of social protocols like Farcaster and others. These tools include cloud hosted hubs, read and write APIs, authorization, data pipelines, hosted DBs, and more. They have become ubiquitous in the Farcaster ecosystem with virtually every application utilizing Neynar in some form. At USV, we believe that useful infrastructure tends to emerge in a particular pattern. Specifically, we’ve historically observed it is apps first that beget infrastructure, which in turn enables new apps. Rish and Manan’s journey is a great example of this pattern in practice. They were initially building a social application on top of Farcaster and found their performance meaningfully hamstrung by the default Farcaster APIs. As they built custom tooling for