Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund co-leads $85 million seed investment in AI startup Sentient

Peter Thiel, managing partner, The Founders Fund

Open source AI development platform Sentient on July 2 announced that it has raised $85 million in a seed round co-led by Peter Theil’s Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures.

Other strategic investors include Ethereal, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Dao5, Delphi, IDG, Primitive Ventures, Nomad, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, Hypersphere, Topology, Protagonist, Folius, Sky9, Hashkey, Canonical, Dispersion, Mirana, Foresight, Spartan, Republic, and others.

The fresh capital raised will be used to accelerate the development of Sentient's open AI platform, whose testnet is slated for Q3 of this year. The startup also plans to invest in hiring top talent in AI research and blockchain engineering, and foster partnerships with leading academic institutions and industry players.

San Francisco-based Sentient’s ‘Core Contributors’, as the founding team calls itself, has Sandeep Nailwal (founder of Polygon), Pramod Viswanath (Forrest G Hamrick Professor of Engineering at Princeton University and the co-inventor of Flash OFDM, the technology behind 4G wireless standard), and Himanshu Tyagi (Professor of Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science), together with Sensys (an Open Source AI venture development company).

Nailwal, a core contributor said, "The rapid advancement of AI has the potential to transform every aspect of our lives, but the concentration of power in the hands of a few centralized entities poses significant risks.”

He added, "By building an open platform for AGI development, we aim to ensure that the benefits of AI are distributed equitably and that its development aligns with the interests of humanity as a whole."

Nailwal was looking for ways that Polygon could use to expand its AI ecosystem. “Since, Sentient will be building on Polygon, likely using Sentient chain with Polygon CDK, it will help Polygon to expand rapidly into AI,” the startup said in a statement.

Also read: Why co-founders are leaving Polygon and what its new version will be

"We're thrilled to support Sentient in their vision to incorporate AI-native cryptography directly into AI models, enabling the ability to effectively monetize open source AI. Currently, anyone is able to just copy models without paying for them and Sentient aims to solve this incentive problem which disincentivises open source AI," said Joey Krug, Partner at Founders Fund.

Sentient aims to foster the development of AI that benefits humanity by bringing ownership rights to open AI development and birthing an era of AI entrepreneurship. It will be establishing an ecosystem of researchers, developers, and users collaborating on an open AI platform, transcending the boundaries of traditional monolithic API-based AI platforms.

Also read: How Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s ‘joke coins’ helped Sandeep Nailwal build a $213-mn initiative