ChainML, a web3-based AI platform, raised $6.2 million in a seed expansion round and unveiled its agent-based layer called Theoriq.
Hack VC led the funding round, with participation from Foresight Ventures, Inception Capital, HTX Ventures, Figment Capital, Hypersphere Ventures and Alumni Ventures, ChainML said Monday. This round, comprised of equity via token warrants, was raised late last year and is currently being announced with the disclosure of Theoriq, ChainML co-founder and CEO Ron Bodkin (formerly Director of Applied Artificial Intelligence Technology at Google). told the block. Bodkin declined to comment on the valuation.
ChainML’s seed expansion round comes nearly two years after it raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by IOSG Ventures in September 2022.
What is ChainML?
ChainML is a web3-based AI research and development startup that aims to decentralize AI access. Today, we unveiled an agent-based layer called Theoriq, a framework for autonomous AI agents to perform complex tasks.
“We believe that our agent-based layer will be the point of value creation for Web3 going forward, enabling intuitive access to Web3 value drivers in DeFi, infrastructure, and Memecoin. We are collaborating with DePIN compute, inference, and resource providers. The data is there,” Bodkin said.
He added that Theoriq leverages blockchain technology to enable agent registration, payments and security. Regarding Theoriq’s specific use cases, Bodkin said ChainML is working with “existing web3 projects” to release AI agents for the community, and more details on this will be revealed at the Consensus 2024 event.
“These agents leverage a variety of input sources, including social media, community feedback and on-chain data, to perform a variety of tasks for the web3 community, from document reading and sentiment analysis to more sophisticated investment plans,” Bodkin said.
Theoriq launched
ChainML plans to launch Theoriq’s testnet this summer and its mainnet later this year, Bodkin said. The company expects to hire about 25 employees in June, with some positions lined up. Bodkin said that with the seed expansion round, ChainML plans to hire more staff across its engineering and research departments and a dedicated go-to-market team.
ChainML competes with other similar web3-enabled AI platforms such as Fetch.ai, Autonolas and MyShell, Bodkin said. “We believe Theoriq will serve as a framework for delivering useful, sophisticated AI agents that solve the problems of web3 and beyond,” Bodkin concluded.
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