Sentient, an open-source AI development platform, has successfully raised $85 million in a seed funding round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund alongside Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures. The funding, announced on July 2, will be pivotal in bolstering Sentient’s team of engineers and advancing its open AI platform. The startup aims to empower AI developers to monetize their open-source models and data, akin to ecosystems like the Super Intelligence Alliance.
“We find ourselves in a landscape reminiscent of the closed-source software era of 1995,” stated the company. “Currently, closed-source AI dominates, concentrating significant power within a few entities. While open-source AI development exists, it lacks adequate incentives for developers to become equitable stakeholders.”
Driving Sentient forward are notable figures such as Sandeep Nailwal, founder of Polygon; Pramod Viswanath, co-inventor of the technology behind the 4G wireless standard and Princeton professor; and Himanshu Tyagi, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science.
Sentient’s underlying blockchain protocol and incentive mechanisms aim to align economic interests for developers, facilitating the evolution of open artificial general intelligence. “Presently, anyone can freely replicate models without compensating creators, and Sentient aims to rectify this incentive gap inherent in open-source AI,” remarked Joey Krug, partner at Founders Fund. Sentient plans to launch its testnet in the latter part of 2024.
The seed funding round also saw support from a diverse array of backers including Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Dao5, Delphi, Primitive Ventures, Nomad, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, Hypersphere, IDG, Topology, Protagonist, Folius, Sky9, Canonical Crypto, Dispersion Capital, Mirana, Foresight, HashKey, Spartan, and others.
Decentralized AI initiatives are gaining momentum within the tech industry, particularly with startups integrating blockchain and AI technologies in 2024. One such example is Ora, which raised $20 million in June from investors Polychain, HF0, and Hashkey Capital. Ora is pioneering technology to tokenize AI models through its initial model offering, leveraging an ERC-20 token framework where token holders can own and share revenue generated by AI models.
The surge in venture capital investments in blockchain startups underscores this trend, with Galaxy Research reporting a 29% increase in funding to $2.49 billion across 603 deals in the first quarter of 2024, marking a 68% rise in deal count from the previous quarter.
X Hall of Flame — Polygon never set out to beat Ethereum: Anurag Arjun