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Polychain and Lightspeed Lead $7M Fundraise for Olympian Mathematics Athlete’s Blockchain-Based AI Platform
Hyperbolicone of the new contenders in the race to apply blockchain technology to artificial intelligence, has raised $7 million in a seed funding round led by Polychain Capital and Lightspeed Faction.
The AI boom has strained the global supply chain for graphics processing units (GPUs) and other hardware used to train AI models. Rising hardware prices have squeezed all but the most resourceful AI companies, making it difficult for startups and researchers to get into AI alongside big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Meta.
Hyperbolic’s blockchain-based cloud platform aims to make AI hardware accessible to a wider range of manufacturers.
“AI companies currently spend over 80% of their capital on compute resources, with no cost-effective solution on the market, causing a bottleneck across the industry due to cost and distribution issues,” Hyperbolic explained in a statement shared with CoinDesk. “Hyperbolic’s solution addresses this issue by creating a scalable system to aggregate global GPU compute and leveraging blockchain technology to ensure their network of nodes operates in a verifiable and secure manner.”
Hyperbolic’s first product will be an artificial intelligence inference service that allows builders to use cutting-edge AI models “at a fraction of the cost,” according to the company. (After an AI model is trained, it makes “inferences” based on user requests, such as when ChatGPT responds to user queries.)
In the long term, the company plans to create a “GPU marketplace” that gives developers and researchers cheaper access to cloud computing hardware to train their AI models.
The seed round saw participation from Chapter One, LongHash, Bankless Ventures, Republic Digital, Nomad Capital, CoinSummer Labs, and Third Earth Capital. It also included angel investors Balaji Srinivasan, Illia Polosukhin of NEAR, and Sandeep Nailwal of Polygon.
Hyperbolic joins a growing group of startups that are raising large sums of money to build a company at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency.
Ultimately, Hyperbolic co-founder Jasper Zhang thinks blockchain projects like his can be used for more than just addressing AI accessibility barriers. Zhang’s pitch, a Winner of the Mathematics Olympiad in China and Russia with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley — is not unlike other cryptocurrency founders who envision a radically new future in which blockchains transform the way artificial intelligence is developed and monetized.
“There will be many more applications based on Hyperbolic,” he said in an interview with CoinDesk. “One example would be a GPU futures exchange: Let’s say you tokenize the future use of a specific GPU and invite traders to come and trade.”
Zhang also imagines that Hyperbolic could be used for “revenue sharing,” changing the way AI models are monetized. “You could tokenize the revenue from an AI model, and then the token holder can help the AI model builder get their project off the ground.”