Sentient, an open source artificial intelligence development platform polygon Matic
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Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder and one of the key contributors, raised $85 million in a startup funding round.
Sentient said Tuesday that Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures co-led the massive round. Other investors in the round include Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, HashKey Capital, Canonical Crypto, and Foresight Ventures.
Nailwal told The Block that Sentient began raising seed funding in March of this year and closed in May. He declined to comment on the structure or valuation of the round.
Nailwal is one of four core contributors to Sentient, along with two prominent professors and an AI venture development startup: Pramod Viswanath, the Forrest G. Hamrick Professor of Engineering at Princeton University and co-inventor of Flash OFDM, the underlying technology of the 4G wireless standard, and Himanshu Tyagi, a professor of engineering at the Indian Institute of Science. The startup, Sensys, was founded by Symbolic Capital co-founder Kenzi Wang and aims to support startups within the Sentient ecosystem.
Nailwal said Polygon wanted to expand into AI when asked why he was focusing on new projects. Nailwal and Wang discussed AI efforts on their own terms, while Viswanath and Tyagi also explored the field on their own terms. Nailwal said the four were brought back together by EigenLayer founder and CEO Sreeram Kannan in October of last year. Tyagi noted in an interview that Kannan was Viswanath’s student and has been an advisor to Sentient since day one.
What is a Sentient?
Sentient builds open-source AI models with community contributions. “AI today is incredibly centralized, and the safety and ethics of AI are questionable,” Nailwal said. “So community-built AI models are key.”
Tyagi said Sentient aims to compete directly with OpenAI. He added that Sentient’s approach to community building is different from OpenAI’s. While OpenAI restricts users to build applications without direct access to the models, Sentient will allow users to access and contribute to the models themselves, Tyagi said, adding that Sentient will also reward contributors.
Tyagi said Sentient will launch “campaigns” for contributors, each with specific metrics to evaluate contributions and rewards based on those metrics. He added that rewards “will come in a variety of forms, including future rewards for shared ownership and use of the AI models they helped build.”
“Today, anyone can copy models without paying, and Sentient wants to solve this incentive problem that disincentivizes open-source AI,” Founders Fund partner Joey Krug said in a statement. “This is a really exciting area of research, and we’re excited to support the Sentient team as they make this vision a reality.”
When asked if Sentient would ever reward contributors with its own token, Nailwal said there are no plans for a token at the moment, but that it will be decided as the community grows.
As for how Polygon will integrate with Sentient, Nailwal said that Sentient will be built on top of Polygon, most likely creating its own chain via the Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK), a modular software toolkit that helps developers launch new layer-2 networks on Ethereum.
Sentient Launch Schedule
Sentient is expected to launch its testnet in Q3 of this year. With the new funding, the project will likely continue to build out its platform. “AI is capital intensive and talent is very expensive,” Nailwal said of raising a large seed round. Tyagi said Sentient has fewer than 20 people working across the U.S. and India, and the project will likely soon hire about 10 people across research and engineering functions.
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