Sentient Secures $85 Million in Seed Funding for Open-Source AI Development
Sentient, an open-source platform for artificial intelligence (AI) development, has raised $85 million in a seed funding round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, with participation from Pantera Capital, Framework Ventures, and others.
Announced on July 2, the funds will be used to hire engineers and advance the development of Sentient’s open AI platform. Sentient aims to empower AI developers to monetize their open-source models and data, similar to the Super Intelligence Alliance ecosystem.
“We are in an era reminiscent of the 1995 closed-source software landscape. Currently, the dominance of closed-source AI centralizes power within a few organizations. While open-source AI development exists, it lacks sufficient incentives for developers to be equal stakeholders,” the company stated.
Sentient’s founders include Sandeep Nailwal of Polygon, Princeton professor Pramod Viswanath, and Indian Institute of Science professor Himanshu Tyagi. The platform’s blockchain protocol and incentive mechanism are designed to ensure economic alignment for developers, promoting the growth of open artificial general intelligence.
Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund, emphasized the incentive problem in open-source AI: “Currently, anyone can copy models without paying for them. Sentient aims to address this issue, which discourages open-source AI development.”
Sentient’s testnet is expected to launch in the third quarter of 2024. The seed round also received backing from 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, and Spartan.
Rise of Decentralized AI
In 2024, the tech industry has seen a surge in startups combining blockchain and AI technologies. Ora, a protocol aiming to bring AI on-chain, raised $20 million from Polychain, HF0, and Hashkey Capital in June. Ora is developing technology for tokenizing AI models, allowing token holders to own and share revenue generated by these models.
Venture capital investments in blockchain startups have significantly increased recently. According to Galaxy Research, 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 compared to the previous quarter.
