We are excited to announce that OpenGradient has raised $8.5 million in seed funding to build an end-to-end decentralized platform where your data and your models belong to you — never to a black-box cloud.
Our Mission and Vision Inspire Steps We Take
At OpenGradient we believe every prompt, heartbeat, and code commit you share should enrich you, not be fracked by big tech, so our goal is to democratize model ownership, guarantee verifiable onchain compute, and give everyone the right to audit, fork, and earn from the intelligence they create.
We strive to scale AI compute onchain with cryptographic proofs that every FLOP happened exactly as claimed, delivering instant, private model deployment while keeping your context encrypted on your device and shareable only on your terms. We envision a future where AI assistants remember you securely, planners fuse your calendars and health metrics without exposing raw data, and creators are rewarded whenever their fine-tuned weights power a new application.
How We Bring Sovereign AI To Life
OpenGradient’s heterogeneous AI compute architecture (HACA) weaves decentralized GPUs and specialty accelerators into an EVM-compatible network that settles and attributes every inference, while our web portal and SDK let Web2 developers ship sovereign agents in seconds without wrestling with consensus algorithms or zero-knowledge math.
Our research lab publishes reproducible baselines and open audits so no judgment, dosage, or headline hides behind closed weights or silent syncs. “No one should have to trade a lifetime of memories for a few lines of AI output,” says our CEO and Co-Founder, Matthew Wang. “With OpenGradient your context stays in your own encrypted memory vault, every inference is proven onchain, and the upside flows back to everyone whose data and ideas made the model smarter.”
Backed by Builders Who Believe in User Ownership
This $8.5 million seed round was led by a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator (a16z CSX) with participation from SV Angel, Coinbase Ventures, SALT Fund, Symbolic Capital, Foresight Ventures, and angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan, Illia Polosukhin, and Sandeep Nailwal, all united by the conviction that the future of AI must be owned by its users.
Principal at SV Angel, Mike Liu, said, “OpenGradient is ushering in a new era for decentralized AI by developing infrastructure to support the next generation of intelligent applications. They've built a truly disruptive tech stack at the intersection of AI and blockchain, and we're excited to support such an innovative and talented team.”
Where We Go Next
The funding will be used to continue building out the decentralized infrastructure, deploying solutions and tools for AI and Web3 developers, and advancing applied ML research to grow the open-source AI ecosystem on blockchain. OpenGradient’s testnet is expected to be available to developers in Q1 2025.
Join the Sovereign AI Movement
We invite builders, researchers, and anyone tired of data fracking to help us create a world where contextual, transparent, and user-owned AI is the default. Learn more at opengradient.ai/blog. Follow us on X and join us on Discord.
Developers - Sign up to gain early access to our solutions.
%20(1).jpg)
