From theblock
PALO ALTO, CA – Dec 25th, 2024 – ChainOpera AI, a pioneering blockchain L1 and AI operating system enabling co-creation and co-ownership of decentralized AI agents and applications, has announced the successful completion of its new 3.5 million seed funding round that brings the funding of ChainOpera and TensorOpera to $17 million for building the ecosystem. The round was led by Finality Capital, Road Capital, and IDG Capital, with participation from notable investors such as Camford VC, ABCDE Capital, Amber Group, and Modular Capital. The companies are also backed by Sparkle Ventures, AimTop Venture, Wisemont Capital, LDV Partners, Acequia Capital, PrimeSet, Plug and Play, Silicon Valley Future Capital, and University of Southern California (USC), and prominent angel investors such as David Tse (Co-founder of BabylonChain), Sreeram Kannan (Founder and CEO of EigenLayer), and Jeff Ren (early investor in AI and Web3).
“This funding is a major step toward fulfilling our vision of a decentralized AI ecosystem that prioritizes AI creation and monetization, data sovereignty and privacy, and inclusive collaboration,” said Prof. Salman Avestimehr, Co-founder and CEO of ChainOpera AI. “With this support from our investors, we are well-positioned to create a platform that not only advances AI innovation but also ensures fair value distribution for all participants.”
The Blockchain AI OS for Co-creating and Co-owning Decentralized AI agents for Humanity
The narrative of ChainOpera AI and the platform being built can be summarized as shown in the figure above.
- The Blockchain L1 and AI Protocol enable co-owning and co-creating decentralized AI agents and apps. Layer 1 would be optimized for AI Inference efficiency, scalability, and security, with AI OS integrated.
- The Federated AI OS™ is a novel platform for creating, deploying, and managing AI agents while enabling AI coin issuance for everyone. It seamlessly integrates Launchpad, ChainOpera AI (CoAI) SDK, AI Agent Framework, and AI Agent Template Marketplace to streamline the AI coin creation process.
- The Federated AI Platform, the world's first decentralized machine learning platform, enables all AI resource contributors—including data, model, and GPU providers—to participate in serving AI agents and apps while earning rewards. This platform builds on years of experience with TensoOpera.ai and FedML.ai.
- Flagship AI Agents and Apps, particularly AI Terminal mobile app, showcase how community-driven AI resources can drive AI content innovation and promote private data sovereignty within the protocol. The community can co-own and co-create diverse autonomous and socialized AI agents.
Innovative Tokenomics for AI Agent Launchpad and Personal AI OS
ChainOpera has several unique innovations in its tokenomics and revenue models, particularly in its token protocols that:
- Enable multi-role token value flows between AI resource providers, agent builders, token issuers, and users (i.e., allowing computing power, data, and model providers to contribute directly to online AI Agents, while other platforms rely on Web2 GPU cloud platforms including AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and Microsoft Azure AI)
- Give token issuers flexibility to publish various AI software and custom tokenomic models
- Rewarding users for contributing their private mobile data to train specialized Web3 language models and generative AI
- Provide agent-to-agent transaction protocols as the foundation for an AI Agent Society
"Creating an inclusive AI economy for all roles demonstrates that we are a truly decentralized AI platform. Going beyond, we think differently, as a blockchain L1 AI platform" said Dr. Aiden He, Co-founder and President of ChainOpera AI. "ChainOpera actively supports diverse AI applications with unique tokenomics. We see LLM-based AI Agents as just one form of AI software, envisioning Personal AI OS with multimodal models and on-device federated learning as powerful digital companions to expand the blockchain AI community."
Unique in Go-to-Market Strategy, Legal Governance Structure, Revenue Model, and Technical Moat
Go-to-market strategy for network effect and AI data flywheel: The network effect is reflected in more AI agent users incentivizing developers to create more templates. AI Agent Builders provides templates for deploying and issuing AI tokens, simplifying transactions and the use of AI Agents. On the data flywheel, the AI Terminal mobile application efficiently collects private data and rewards users for their data contributions through daily input. Federated learning then trains specialized AI Agents and task-specific models, resulting in unique GenAI models that benefit the community, which in turn further incentivizes the creation of more distinctive AI agents.
Legal governance structure bridging web2 and web3: The ChainOpera Foundation incorporates Web2 enterprise-level AI platforms like TensorOpera.ai and FedML.ai. By bridging Web2 and Web3 AI technologies, it delivers customized model services for Web3 and generates unique private data. Unlike other AI companies that simply purchase Web2 model services, ChainOpera can customize the underlying infrastructure for Web3, enabling innovative token economic models.
Healthy revenue models: ChainOpera Ecosystem maintains a healthy revenue model, generating substantial recurring revenue from enterprise AI services, with 7,000 AI model developers onboarded and high daily model inference usage. Additionally, in the web3 space, the platform generates revenue through token issuance for community maintenance, platform fees, AI model and agent services, and upcoming AI mobile phone sales.
Deep technical moat: The core team members have collectively earned over 30,000 academic citations, with papers published at top AI and blockchain conferences. Their recent research includes groundbreaking work on proof of contribution, ZKML, the Fox small language model, ScaleLLM for scalable LLM serving, TensorOpera Router for edge-cloud hybrid model serving, and numerous papers on federated and distributed training using geographically distributed data. ChainOpera Platform is backed by years of efforts in these deep technologies.
Globally Distributed Team with Diverse Background
ChainOpera's co-founders, Prof. Salman Avestimehr and Dr. Aiden He, bring extensive backgrounds in AI and blockchain technologies. Prof. Avestimehr serves as a Dean's Professor at the University of Southern California (USC), directs the USC-Amazon Center on Trustworthy AI, and is an IEEE Fellow in AI and decentralized computation. Dr. He contributes rich R&D experience from leading internet companies including Meta, Google, AWS, and Tencent, with expertise in machine learning and AI applications, and has been deeply involved in Web3 projects. Together, they are also co-founders of TensorOpera and FedML, a leading AI company providing GenAI model services and AI agents to enterprises and developers.
The broader founding team includes members with exceptional backgrounds from prestigious institutions including UC Berkeley, Stanford, USC, MIT, Tsinghua, Google, Amazon, Tencent, Meta, and Apple. They bring extensive experience in developing and operating AI/Web3 communities for consumer applications with large user bases.
ChainOpera AI now comprises more than 40 team members across San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Dubai, London, Greece, and Germany.
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