On the evening of July 2, the open source AI platform Sentient completed a seed round of financing of $85 million. This should be the largest amount of financing for a crypto AI project announced this year. With so much seed round financing, not to mention the recent bad market, even in the bull market, there are few such financings.
The investors are also extremely luxurious. Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures jointly led the investment, and Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, HashKey Capital and a bunch of famous and unknown VCs participated in the investment.
Logically speaking, such a great project should have been well-known before, but this is the first time I have heard of this project. I went into the project Discord and saw that there were only more than 100 people in it. I was relieved, because it turned out that no one paid attention to this project before.
It doesn’t matter if no one is paying attention to it. There must be something really cool about this project that makes VCs willing to pay for it! With this in mind, I opened the project’s official website again.
Hmm, did I click on the wrong website? For a project that raised so much money, the foundation website was built with Notion. This once again raised my lower limit of understanding of VC projects. After the shock, let's take a closer look at the product roadmap.
Short-term goals:
A community-created AI development resource management system (similar to Hugging Face)
A blockchain protocol for trading AI development resources (a new chain based on Polygon CDK)
· Conducting first activities with the community
Medium-term Goal:
· Develop the OML file format standard (OML is a new concept created by Sentient, which stands for open, monetizable and loyal. Sentient wants to develop such a model)
AI services provided by the Sentient community (that is, models can be run on Sentient)
AI resource usage tracking system based on signature network (that is, the underlying blockchain protocol can record the usage of AI models or data sets)
Start the joint construction of multiple AICs (that is, promote several ecological projects)
Long-term goals:
New base models built by community contributors (allowing AI companies to open source models on top of it)
Open AGI powered by the OML model (yes, it wants to compete with OpenAI to develop AGI first)
Incentive and monetization mechanisms for the new AI developer economy
Since it is a goal, it means that none of these things exist now. Currently it is just a PPT financing.
After looking around, isn't Sentient just trying to be a Hugging Face with an underlying blockchain protocol and an added economic incentive layer? Hugging Face is an open source platform for AI, where users can publish and share pre-trained models, data sets, and demo files. It provides a complete AI development ecosystem and has become the world's most popular open source machine learning community and platform.
The business plan on Sentient's official website should be written by ChatGPT. Are VCs stupid for not looking at fundamentals to raise so much money that others cannot? Of course not. The endless high FDV/low circulation stocks that have emerged this year have taught every innocent investor a lesson.
The VC was able to give so much money because of Sandeep Nailwal, one of the four core contributors of Sentient. Nailwal is the co-founder of Polygon, a top Indian Web3 platform. Among the four core contributors, there are two Indian faces, Pramod Viswanath and Himanshu Tyagi, who should have been brought in by him to keep the company going.
As for Sensys, it is a startup founded by Kenzi Wang, co-founder of Symbolic Capital. It should also be the developer and major contributor of the Sentient AI platform. The official website also has a few PPTs, which probably tells you "Coming soon".
Kenzi Wang was previously the vice president and general manager of Huobi Global. He met Sandeep Nailwal at Binance Labs in 2019, and later invested in Polygon Labs and co-founded Symbolic Capital.
After some analysis, Sentient is simply the top-level project in the Indian-Chinese cooperation. The blank webpage opened up the vision and imagination of various VCs, making them scramble to become a part of Sentient's first round of financing as if seeing a delicacy.
Many people say that you can’t tell anything about a project in its early stages, and you can only see how good the founder is. Investing in a project has been simplified to investing in the founder. Sandeep Nailwal was already a successful founder of a project with a market value of tens of billions. He has created a more imaginative new game. Who wouldn’t be willing to get involved?
What these foreign VCs don’t know is that the same thing has already happened in China. A recent example is that “Light Years Away”, founded by Wang Huiwen, the second in command of Meituan, quickly raised $300 million in financing without a complete technical solution or any products, and was hastily acquired by Meituan in less than half a year. History has always repeatedly verified a saying: few projects born with a silver spoon in their mouths can make it to the end.
However, VCs may have no other choice. How can they explain to LPs if they don’t deploy all the money they have raised? Moreover, even if the project fails in the end, VCs who participated in the early stage can still withdraw safely. They know that although retail investors are now saying that they will not take over, their bodies will always come to see if there is an opportunity to take advantage of the airdrop.
Although the future is uncertain, perhaps we can try to be more tolerant of Sentient. After all, AI is a very difficult and competitive field, and companies in this field may determine the future of mankind. No one wants the future to be controlled by giants like OpenAI, Google and Meta.
With top founders and lavish investments, Sentient, a new decentralized AI platform, has at least a better chance of surviving and competing with the giants of Web2. Perhaps Sandeep Nailwal's bold crossover and the mindless FOMO of various VCs will really create a more OML (open, monetizable, and loyal) AI development landscape for us.