Sentient Labs, an AI startup based on blockchain with its headquarters in the United Arab Emirates, has raised $85 million in seed funding. Framework Ventures, Pantera Capital, which supported Few and Far and Brine Fi, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund co-led the round.
Arrington Capital, Canonical, Delphi, Dao5, Ethereal, Folius, Foresight, Hack VC, Hashkey, Hypersphere, IDG, Mirana, Nomad, Primitive Ventures, Protagonist, Republic, Robot Ventures, Sky9, Spartan, Symbolic Capital, Topology, and a number of other investors are additional strategic investors.
The money will be used by Sentient Labs to quicken the creation of an open-source AI platform. Additionally, it plans to grow its workforce by bringing on board blockchain and AI research specialists. Additionally, it wants to collaborate with top universities and business leaders.
Academics Pramod Viswanath and Himanshu Tyagi, as well as co-founder and executive chairman of Polygon Labs Sandeep Nailwal, formed the company in 2024. Its goal is to democratize AI research and development so that AI advances humankind as a whole.
Engineers that complete tasks like data labelling and refining—which are crucial for training AI models—are rewarded by the system. Software from Polygon, which is also making inroads into the AI space, is employed by this platform. Its goal is to create an open, community-driven AGI platform by utilizing Polygon to implement blockchain technology.
GitHub, GitLab, OneDev, and other platforms host a plethora of AI projects. Most projects are duplicates of already-existing ones or redundant. This is the point at which Sentient—an AI project—is necessary.
In an industry dominated by tech giants, the company wants to use blockchain technology to create an open world where justice and transparency are achieved. Sentient Labs stands apart from other AI behemoths like OpenAI, Google, or Meta thanks to this strategy. This company provides an open-source method, whereas the majority of these AI projects are closed-source or semi-closed.
“We’re not just another AI project,” stated co-founder Himanshu Tyagi. “We’re building an open world through blockchain to achieve transparency and fairness. When our AI is used, everyone who contributed will be rewarded through the blockchain protocol.”
