Prime Intellect Secures $5.5M in Seed Funding Co-Led By Distributed Global and CoinFund to Advance Its Decentralized and Collaborative AI Ecosystem

Funding will be used to build The Prime Intellect protocol to establish a decentralized AI ecosystem where participants are rewarded for contributions 

SAN FRANCISCO, April 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Prime Intellect, an open and decentralized AI platform and protocol democratizing access to computing and intelligence, today announced a $5.5M seed round co-led by Distributed Global and CoinFund with participation from Compound, Collab+Currency and Filecoin Creator Juan Benet with Protocol Labs, as well as prominent angel investors including Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. The funding will be used to build out the compute platform, enabling decentralized training across instances and enabling co-ownership of AI models by contributing compute, code, data, capital, or expertise.

Generative AI is poised to become a $1.3 trillion dollar market by 2032, yet AI progress is severely bottlenecked by the category's operations already leaning heavily toward a traditional, centralized model of control: startups are capped by prohibitive computational costs, inflexible contracts, proprietary models that stifle open collaboration and insufficient incentives to pool resources and expertise. Prime Intellect is working to solve these problems through a decentralized AI platform, powered by advances in distributed model training. The platform aggregates global compute power to provide instant, affordable and scalable on-demand compute. Using Prime Intellect, anyone can help train powerful AI models and share in their ownership.

"By enabling collective governance of AI models and compute, Prime Intellect enables anyone to have a stake in the future of AI," said Vincent Weisser, Co-Founder, Prime Intellect. "Decentralized AI is one of the highest impact opportunities in history. We must break down the barriers that prevent brilliant minds from contributing to our collective future. Diverse communities of researchers, engineers, and organizations will be able to come together using the Prime Intellect platform to create transformative AI capabilities that would be impossible in isolation."

At the core of the company's platform is the Prime Intellect (PI) protocol, which provides the critical infrastructure and cryptoeconomic building blocks to align incentives around decentralized AI development, including:

• Massively scalable, distributed compute marketplace to make AI training globally accessible and affordable
• Collective ownership of AI models and compute via the PI protocol to incentivize contributions of compute, capital, code and continuous model improvement
• On-chain AI protocol primitives to facilitate trust and seamless collaboration
• Decentralized governance frameworks to align AI progress with collective human values

The compute platform is live in beta, aggregating supply from 10+ centralized and decentralized GPU cloud providers, offering the most low cost GPUs on demand. Prime Intellect will soon roll out multi-node compute on-demand (16 to 128+ GPUs) and decentralized training across instances with optimized orchestration for efficiency. Customers can apply for early access at primeintellect.ai/.

Prime Intellect cofounders Vincent Weisser and Johannes Hagemann offer an unusual and deep combination of AI and web3 experience. Vincent helped start VitaDAO, the leading organization in decentralized science, before leading product and AI at Molecule, the platform for biopharma IP. Johannes built and scaled distributed training frameworks from scratch at Aleph Alpha, and received a Best Paper Award for his recent work at NeurIPS 2023. Together they are solving some of the largest pain points for the wider AI community today, applying web3 primitives for scalability and alignment.

Einar Braathen, Partner at CoinFund, commented, "The future of publicly available AI will be about verifiability and decentralization across the stack. Prime Intellect will enable a critical component of this through access to compute, optimized training and tokenized ownership. Vincent and Johannes are an incredibly talented team, with a rare combination of experience and vision, and we're thrilled to support them in the early stages of their journey."

"The Prime Intellect platform removes the barriers of prohibitive computational costs, long contracts and limited access to scalable compute," said Lennard Schmidt, Cofounder at Langdock, an AI platform for team productivity. "Their platform provides critical infrastructure to align incentives around decentralized AI development"

For more information on the beta rollout and vision for the Prime Intellect protocol, visit the Prime Intellect blog.

About Prime Intellect
Prime Intellect is a decentralized AI platform and protocol democratizing access to compute and intelligence. The platform enables the training of state-of-the-art AI models through globally aggregated compute, enabling decentralized training across instances and empowering you to co-own AI models by contributing compute, code, data, capital, or expertise. To learn more visit www.primeintellect.ai

About Distributed Global
Distributed Global is an investment firm focused on the blockchain and digital asset ecosystem.

About CoinFund
CoinFund is one of the world's first cryptonative investment firms and a registered investment adviser founded in 2015. The firm champions the leaders of the new internet, powered by foresight as active investors to achieve extraordinary outcomes. CoinFund invests in seed, venture, and liquid opportunities within the blockchain sector with a focus on digital assets, decentralization technologies, and key enabling infrastructure. For more information, visit CoinFund.io, LinkedIn or join us on X.

SOURCE Prime Intellect