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[New York, NY – October 9, 2024] – OpenGradient, a pioneering decentralized AI infrastructure company, has successfully raised $8.5 million in seed funding. This investment marks a significant milestone in the company's mission to democratize AI model ownership, streamline deployment, and provide universal access to cutting-edge AI technologies. The funding round was led by a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator (a16z CSX), with participation from prominent investors including SV Angel, Coinbase Ventures, SALT Fund, Symbolic Capital, Foresight Ventures, and notable angel investors such as Balaji Srinivasan (former Coinbase CTO), Illia Polosukhin (NEAR Founder), and Sandeep Nailwal (Polygon Founder).
OpenGradient is building an end-to-end decentralized platform that offers scalable AI compute on-chain. This innovative approach ensures verifiability and attribution while significantly enhancing the security of AI deployment and hosting. The platform's multi-layer technology stack comprises an EVM-compatible blockchain featuring a novel Heterogeneous AI Compute Architecture (HACA) and a proprietary library of tools designed to support and scale secure AI workflows on-chain.
Key Features and Benefits of OpenGradient:
- Decentralized Model Hosting: A decentralized filestore infrastructure allows permissionless access, upload, and download of any AI model, enabling immediate use on the OpenGradient Network or SDK. This fosters a collaborative and open ecosystem for AI development.
- Secure and Verifiable Inference: OpenGradient provides trust-minimized inference directly from smart contracts, secured natively by the network. Developers can choose from a range of cryptographic verification schemes to best suit their specific use cases.
- Scalable AI Compute On-Chain: The platform's HACA enables efficient and scalable execution of AI models on-chain, opening up new possibilities for decentralized AI applications.
- Simplified Development with Web2 Tools: OpenGradient offers a web portal and SDK that allow Web2 developers to leverage the AI stack without needing deep blockchain expertise. This simplifies the integration of decentralized AI into existing applications.
- Model Composability: Developers can seamlessly combine multiple models in smart contracts, enabling the creation of powerful mixture-of-experts style AI applications and ensembles.
- Empowering dApp Development: OpenGradient empowers dApp developers to easily integrate AI capabilities into their projects, unlocking new functionalities for risk management, Sybil resistance, ML optimization, DeFi mechanisms, AI agents, and more.
- Open-Source AI Acceleration: OpenGradient is committed to advancing applied ML research and growing the open-source AI ecosystem on blockchain.
Funding Allocation and Future Plans:
The secured funding will be strategically allocated to further develop the decentralized infrastructure, deploy essential solutions and tools for AI and Web3 developers, and advance applied ML research to foster the growth of the open-source AI ecosystem on blockchain. OpenGradient's testnet is anticipated to be available to developers in Q4 2024.
Quotes from Key Stakeholders:
Matthew Wang, CEO and Co-Founder of OpenGradient: "Developers today face significant challenges when building secure software for custom AI models. OpenGradient revolutionizes this process, offering near-instantaneous model deployment and secure inference of AI models in mere seconds."
Mike Liu, Principal at SV Angel: "OpenGradient is ushering in a new era for decentralized AI by developing infrastructure to support the next generation of intelligent applications. They've built a truly disruptive tech stack at the intersection of AI and blockchain, and we're excited to support such an innovative and talented team."
About OpenGradient:
OpenGradient is a leading decentralized platform unlocking scalable AI compute on-chain, empowering developers to build secure, intelligent, and optimized decentralized applications. The company is headquartered in New York City and comprises a global team with deep expertise in AI/ML, blockchain, cryptography, and the Web3 ecosystem.
Developers interested in early access to OpenGradient's solutions can sign up on the company's website. Follow OpenGradient on X (formerly Twitter) and join the Discord community for the latest updates.
Compiled by CMO Intern team
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