PANews reported on July 2 that according to The Block, the open source AI platform Sentient raised $85 million in a seed round of financing co-led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures. One of Sentient's core contributors is Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, and EigenLayer founder and CEO Sreeram Kannan has served as an advisor from beginning to end. Other investors include Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, HashKey Capital, Canonical Crypto and Foresight Ventures.

Sentient is committed to building open source AI models through community contributions to compete with OpenAI. Sentient will allow users to access and contribute models and provide rewards based on contributions. Sentient plans to launch a testnet in the third quarter of this year and will use the new funds to continue building its platform. Nailwal said that Sentient will be built on Polygon and may create its own chain through the Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK).