Sandeep Nailwal's Sentient gets $85 million funding from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, others

Blockchain-based AI startup Sentient has raised $85 million in a seed funding round co-led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures.

Other notable backers include Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, and Republic, among others. 

What does Sentient do?

Co-founded by Polygon's founder Sandeep Nailwal, San Francisco-based Sentient aims to revolutionize the AI landscape by integrating blockchain technology with artificial intelligence. 

The startup's mission is to create decentralized AI solutions. envisions an open platform where developers, researchers, and businesses can be compensated for their contributions to AI tools.

"Our vision at Sentient is to ensure AI benefits humanity as a whole. By creating an open platform for AGI development, we aim to distribute AI's benefits equitably and align its growth with global interests," the company wrote on X.

We are thrilled to announce Sentient's $85M seed round, co-led by @foundersfund with @peterthiel, alongside @PanteraCapital and @hiFramework. This marks a pivotal step in aligning AI development toward a community-built open AGI platform.

Our vision at Sentient is to ensure AI… pic.twitter.com/6KyjjPcRUd

— Sentient (@sentient_agi) July 2, 2024

Key players involved in Sentient

The core contributors of Sentient include notable figures such as 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).

These individuals bring extensive expertise in blockchain technology, AI research, and ecosystem building. 

"With this fundraising, Sentient already has some of the world's best AI minds joining it, and the AI team is getting pretty stacked with senior people from Google, DeepMind, and other top AI companies in the world engaged,” Nailwal mentioned in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

Purpose of fundraising

Sentient will use the raised capital acquired funds will be used to accelerate the development of its open AI platform, with the testnet expected to launch in Q3 of this year. 

The startup plans to invest in hiring top talent in AI research and blockchain engineering.

Additionally, It intends to foster partnerships with leading academic institutions and industry players.

"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 added.

Addressing the current AI landscape

Sentient is addressing the challenges posed by the concentration of power in the hands of a few centralized entities in the AI sector. The startup aims to bring ownership rights to AI development, creating an era of fair AI entrepreneurship.

"Currently, anyone is able to just copy models without paying for them, and Sentient aims to solve this incentive problem which disincentivizes open source AI," said Joey Krug, Partner at Founders Fund.