Sahara AI secures $43M to develop collaborative, decentralized AI platform

Decentralized platform Sahara AI has raised $43 million in funding to develop an artificial intelligence and blockchain-based collaborative economy. 

The round was led by Pantera Capital, Binance Labs and Polychain Capital, with participation from Samsung, Matrix Partners, dao5, Geekcartel, Nomad Capital, SCB 10X, Canonical Capital, Mirana Ventures, Foresight Ventures and other investors.

The startup has been working since 2022 on a platform that will allow onchain attribution throughout the AI development cycle, providing rewards for participants for operating infrastructure, fine-tuning a model, building an autonomous agent, contributing knowledge or developing an application.

“Most AI today remains trapped in a Web2 paradigm where users trade their knowledge for access to AI or machine learning tools. There is often no transparency on how users’ proprietary models and agents are used by these centralized AI providers, and no protection or compensation for users’ contributions,” Sean Ren, CEO and co-founder of Sahara Labs, told Cointelegraph.

The company pledges to deliver a secure and transparent “copyright” framework for managing AI assets on the blockchain through its Sahara Blockchain Protocols. According to Ren, these protocols include AI-based solutions for tracking assets, licensing for controlling access, ownership for securing nontransferable records and attribution for tracking contributions and distributing revenue.

“This ensures that all contributors are fairly compensated, sovereignty of data and models are maintained, and AI assets can be securely created, shared and traded, all while preserving privacy and promoting inclusivity,” said Ren.

Tyler Zhou, co-founder and chief operating officer at Sahara AI, is also behind the startup. According to his LinkedIn profile, Zhou is also an investment director at Binance Labs.

“Our team saw this challenge within the existing AI landscape and we started brainstorming solutions in Q2 2022 (pre-GPT era) as one of the earliest,” said Ren about the alleged lack of transparency and centralization of power behind major technology companies working on AI solutions.

“Users frequently interact with AI-driven services without knowing how their data is being used or the providence of the information that contributed to the AI’s outputs,” he continued, adding that “as AI becomes more powerful, questions arise about who controls these systems and how they’re used.”

Sahara’s testnet and mainnet are expected to go live in the coming months.