AI Platform Sentient Secures USD 85 Mn Funding Led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund The raised funds will support the hiring of engineers and the development of Sentient's open AI platform.

Sentient, an open-source AI development platform, has announced the raising of USD 85 million in a seed round of funding led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund alongside Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures.

Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Dao5, Delphi, Primitive Ventures, Nomad, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, Hypersphere, IDG, Topology, Protagonist, Folius, Sky9, Canonical Crypto, Dispersion Capital, Mirana, Foresight, HashKey, Spartan, and others participated in the round.

The raised funds will support the hiring of engineers and the development of Sentient's open AI platform.

"The rapid advancement of AI has the potential to transform every aspect of our lives, but the concentration of power in the hands of a few centralised entities poses significant risks," said Polygon Co-founder and Sentient core contributor Sandeep Nailwal.

San Francisco-based Sentient provides an open-source platform for AI research and development with the goal of "aligning AI innovations toward a community-built open AGI."

AGI is still a theoretical milestone where AI rivals or exceeds human intelligence across all knowledge areas.

"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.

The startup is an AI research organisation that wants to enable AI developers to monetize their open-source models and data, similar to other ecosystems such as the Super Intelligence Alliance.

"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. Sentient's testnet will be available in this quarter of 2024.