Sentient, an open-source AI development platform, has raised $85 million in seed funding led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, with contributions from Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures.
This funding will help recruit engineers and advance Sentient’s open AI platform, as announced on July 2.
Sentient aims to empower AI developers to monetize their open-source models and data, drawing parallels to ecosystems like the Super Intelligence Alliance.
The company noted, “We are in an era reminiscent of the 1995 closed-source software landscape.
“At present, the dominance of closed-source AI has centralized immense power with a few organizations. Although open-source AI development exists, it lacks sufficient incentives for developers and does not enable them to be equal stakeholders.”
The startup’s leadership includes Sandeep Nailwal, founder of Polygon; Pramod Viswanath, Princeton professor and co-inventor of the technology behind the 4G wireless standard; and Himanshu Tyagi, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science.
Sentient plans to leverage a blockchain protocol and incentive mechanism to align economic interests for developers, fostering the growth of open artificial general intelligence.
Joey Krug, partner at Founders Fund, stated, “Currently, anyone is able to just copy models without paying for them and Sentient aims to solve this incentive problem which disincentivizes open source AI.” Sentient’s testnet is set to launch in the current quarter of 2024.
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Additional investors in the seed round include 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 is gaining momentum in the tech industry, with numerous startups merging blockchain and AI technologies in 2024.
One such protocol, Ora, raised $20 million from Polychain, HF0, and Hashkey Capital in June.
Ora is developing technology for tokenizing AI models via its initial model offering.
This ERC-20 token-based mechanism allows token holders to own and share revenue from AI models.
Venture capital investment in blockchain startups has surged recently.
Galaxy Research data shows that investors poured $2.49 billion into 603 deals in the first quarter of 2024, marking a 29% increase in funding and a 68% rise in deal count from the previous quarter.
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