New York-based Shuttle Labs, which is developing the Lore blockchain search engine and analytics platform, has raised $ 2.3 million from SALT.org, Menlo Park, Calif.-based Floodgate and individual investors including former Coinbase executive Balaji Srinivasan.
Lore calls itself an AI-first block data search engine, as it leverages large language models to easily decipher blockchains. It expects to challenge incumbent Etherscan and others by building a platform that “unifies the fragmented world of block data into a single, searchable interface, making blockchains unintimidating, accessible, and genuine sources of truth for all stakeholders.”
“We’ve just introduced the Ethereum beta and received an outpouring of support and positive feedback from the community,” said Lore CEO Armaan Kalsi, a Yale graduate who joined with schoolmate Brihu Sundararaman and Ryan Myher, a dropout, to start Lore. Sundararaman serves as Lore’s chief technology officer.
The soft launch of the beta brought 1,500 new users on ETH, said Myher, previously a co-founder of Magestic AI. Myher says the company is “building a set of tooling to replace the current block data explorer standard.” Lore is rapidly expanding its support for new Layer 2 networks, aspiring to become the quintessential explorer and tooling hub for every ecosystem, he added.
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The founding team has engaged in extensive research on so-called Web3 — an emerging, upgraded version of the web, incorporating concepts such as decentralization, blockchain technologies, and token-based economics. Lore contends that the current tools offered by Etherscan, Blockchain.com or Blockscout suffer from several shortcomings, and “do little to help deliver on Web3’s true promise” of an accessible, open, searchable ledger of record.
“If we are not careful to unify the discovery of insights across these networks, Web3 will resemble a pre-Google internet — not ready to onboard millions, let alone billions,” warned Kalsi.
Kalsi has expressed satisfaction with the “pace of innovation,” citing as evidence the proliferation of open-source frameworks such as Optimism’s Bedrock stack and ZKsync.
