Sentient, an open-source development platform for artificial intelligence (AI), has secured $85 million in a seed funding round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund alongside Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures. 

According to a July 2 announcement, the funds will support the hiring of engineers and the development of Sentient’s open AI platform. The startup is an AI research organization that wants to enable AI developers to monetize their open-source models and data, similar to other ecosystems such as the Super Intelligence Alliance.

“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 company stated.

Behind the startup are Sandeep Nailwal, the founder of Polygon; Pramod Viswanath, Princeton professor and co-inventor of the technology powering the 4G wireless standard; and Himanshu Tyagi, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science.

According to Sentient, its underlying blockchain protocol and incentive mechanism will ensure economic alignment for developers, enabling the evolution of open artificial general intelligence.

“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,” said Joey Krug, partner at Founders Fund. Sentient’s testnet will be available in this quarter of 2024.

The seed round was also backed by 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 gains traction

The tech industry has seen a surge in startups combining blockchain and AI technologies in 2024.

Among the protocols seeking to bring AI onchain is Ora, which  raised $20 million from Polychain, HF0 and Hashkey Capital in June. The protocol is building a technology for tokenizing AI models through its initial model offering. Based on an ERC-20 token, the mechanism will entitle anyone who buys a token to own and share revenue generated by an AI model.

Venture capital investments in blockchain startups have increased significantly in recent months. According to data compiled by Galaxy Research, investors injected $2.49 billion into 603 deals in the first quarter of 2024, a 29% increase in funding and a 68% rise in deal count from the previous quarter.

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