A Dragon\u2019s Den tycoon who dropped out of university has raised $24 million (\u00a320 million) in funding for a new blockchain<\/a> business in a deal which values the company at \u00a3136 million.<\/p>\n 29-year-old Steven Bartlett launched the tech firm, called thirdweb, alongside co-founder Furqan Rydhan after deciding there wasn\u2019t enough digital infrastructure<\/a> to help start-ups<\/a> build their own blockchain technology platforms.<\/p>\n Bartlett told the Standard: \u201cBefore thirdweb if you\u2019re a developer you have to learn a new coding language and it could take you a year or two years to build an application. Using third web you can build an application in a few clicks.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen there\u2019s a gold rush you have people that are searching for the gold or you have people that are making the shovels.\u201d<\/p>\n The funding round was led by Haun Ventures and includes commitments from e-commerce platform Shopify<\/a> and crypto<\/a> firm Coinbase Ventures. Major investors in the company\u2019s earlier seed funding round include serial entrepreneurs Gary Vaynerchuck and Mark Cuban. Cuban is one of the top 600 richest people in the world with a wealth of \u00a33.9 billion, according to Forbes.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s fair to say both myself and Furqan as founders having the track record we have, we could have funded thirdweb ourselves, but the strategic support that we\u2019re getting now from these partners is even more important to us than the capital itself,\u201d Bartlett said.<\/p>\n Blockchain technology and the crypto firms which operate on it have attracted controversy in recent months, with a record \u00a31.6 billion worth of\u00a0cryptocurrency<\/a>\u00a0stolen in hacks of services in the year to July 2022, according to blockchain platform Chainalysis<\/a>, as organised online criminals and nefarious state actors exploit vulnerabilities in decentralised finance. Bartlett was not put off by those reports.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fundamental blockchain technology is incredibly secure. I think in web1, web2 or web3 there\u2019s always going to be vulnerabilities to systems and technologies and I think that web3 as a technology actually solves tons of the security issues,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n