Blockchain-Based AI Startup Sentient Labs Raises $85 Million in Seed Funding

Sentient Labs, a UAE-based blockchain and AI startup, has secured $85 million in seed funding. The investment round was co-led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures.

The funding also saw participation from Arrington Capital, Canonical, Dao5, Delphi, Dispersion, Ethereal, Folius, Foresight, Hack VC, Hashkey, Hypersphere, IDG, Mirana, Nomad, Primitive Ventures, Protagonist, Republic, Robot Ventures, Sky9, Spartan, Symbolic Capital, Topology, and other strategic investors.

With this new capital, Sentient Labs plans to accelerate the development of its open-source AI platform. The startup will expand its team by hiring experts in AI research and blockchain engineering and establishing partnerships with leading academic institutions and industry players.

Founded in 2024 by Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder and executive chairman of Polygon Labs, along with academics Pramod Viswanath and Himanshu Tyagi, Sentient Labs aims to democratize AI development. The company's mission is to ensure that AI benefits humanity as a whole.

The platform rewards engineers for essential tasks like data labeling and refining, which are crucial for training AI models. Sentient Labs uses Polygon's software to build a community-driven open AGI platform, leveraging blockchain technology to ensure transparency and fairness.

“There are numerous AI projects on platforms such as GitHub, GitLab, and OneDev, many of which are redundant or replicas of existing ones. This underscores the need for an AI project like Sentient,” said co-founder Himanshu Tyagi. “We’re not just another AI project. 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.”