Nansen’s 2022 revenue jumps by 5x but swings to loss after profitable year

The Nansen team / Photo credit: Nansen

Singapore-based Nansen‘s revenue hit US$17.5 million in 2022, indicating an over 5x increase, according to VentureCap Insights, which tracks regulatory filings in the city-state.

This revenue surge comes after the blockchain analytics platform grew the institutional side of its business, Nansen CEO Alex Svanevik tells Tech in Asia. While the company started out by providing data to individual investors, it now also serves crypto businesses, leading to a gain in subscribers.

As a result, Nansen’s subscription revenue, which represents about 90% of its total revenue, jumped 4.5x to US$15.3 million in 2022.

Nansen is touted as the “Bloomberg for digital assets,” helping crypto investors make informed decisions through its intelligence platform. Companies like OpenSea, Polygon, and Google are part of its user base. The platform allows blockchain firms, crypto exchanges, and marketplaces to access its custom dashboards that help analyze user patterns.

Despite the revenue growth, Nansen swung to a loss of US$15.9 million in 2022 after recording a profit of US$751,000 in 2021. It attributed the losses to higher employee expenses, which is the company’s largest cost.

Employee expenses also accounts for over 65% of its total expenses. Due to an aggressive hiring spree to handle its expanding customer base, the Nansen’s total expenses rose by nearly 10x to reach US$26.9 million in 2022.

Nansen’s headcount doubled from 75 employees at the end of 2021 to 150 people in 2022.

That said, the company has already reduced its workforce. Nansen announced in May that it was laying off 30% of its team following a major downturn in the crypto market in 2022. Currently, it has 100 employees.

The job cuts will definitely bring down the company’s expenses.

Nansen has also reported deferred revenue worth about US$3.1 million in the form of advance payments from customers in 2022, which will be accounted for in its 2023 filings.

When asked whether Nansen expects to incur a loss as well this year, Svanevik says that being profitable is not a “near-term priority.” While profitability is “important,” he added that its natural for startups to lose money for several years as they scale up.