Quick take:
- The company is building a blockchain platform that rewards users, data sources and AI trainers for their contributions.
- Sahara AI plans to use the capital to expand its team, advance its platform and grow its developer ecosystem.
- The company has already collaborated with leading technology companies including Microsoft, Amazon and Snap.
Sahara AI, a startup building a platform that leverages blockchain technology to address key concerns of artificial intelligence has raised $43 million in a Series A round co-led by Pantera Capital, Binance Labs and Polychain Capital.
Earlier this year, Sahara AI also raised $6 million in a seed round led by Alumni Ventures and Polychain with Matrix, Dispersion Capital, GeekCartel and Sequoia Capital participating.
Why it matters
Sahara is building a platform that rewards users, data sources and AI trainers for their contributions to building AI models. The company plans to use the new funds to expand its team, advance its platform and grow its developer ecosystem.
Sahara is using blockchain technology to address a disparity in the current economic model of the AI industry that only rewards the company that created it.
Founded in 2023, Sahara AI has already generated multi-million revenues from the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, MIT, Snap, and Character AI, the company wrote in a blog post in March. At the time, it had more than enterprise 30 clients and over 200 AI trainers globally.
The BIG picture
AI models rely on data collected from human activity and machine learning algorithms to improve themselves and become more efficient. However, traditional models of collecting user data have often fallen short when it comes to the security and privacy of information.
With the advancement of AI and the burgeoning state of the industry driven by generative AI, voice cloning algorithms, chatbots and others, there are even more concerns about protecting user privacy.
Sahara’s AI network features three main segments, an execution layer, a transaction layer and an application layer, all built on the blockchain. The application layer makes it possible for anyone to deploy their own AI agent, while the transaction layer provides access to data.
The execution layer is a network of public and private nodes for data storage built with proprietary tech that includes decentralized LoRA, hypertuning, PKI, and personal watermark.
It is the combination of these technologies that facilitates secure, private, ownership-preserving exchanges of data and AI models derived from user-proprietary data, the company said in an earlier statement.
Commenting on the Series A round and Sahara’s vision, Sahara AI’s co-founder and CEO Sean Ren told Reuters: “There is often no transparency on how users’ proprietary models and agents are used by these centralized AI providers, and no protection or compensation for users’ contributions.”.
“Ethical concerns over copyright, privacy, resource access, and economic imbalances continue to grow as AI becomes more widely adopted and capable.”
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