Vana, a web3 startup that aims to build a network of user-owned data pools, announced Wednesday that it had raised an additional $5 million, bringing its total funding to $25 million.
The startup said in a statement that Coinbase Ventures led the strategic round. Vana has also previously raised capital from the prolific crypto VC Paradigm, which led a $18 million Series A in the firm.
The startup has set out to build a network of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, that use its blockchain technology to address a lack of training data for AI models while providing a way for internet users to earn income. Vana is one of many companies currently attempting to build a business around an intersection between blockchain and artificial intelligence.
The company’s co-founder and CEO, Anna Kazlauskas, says that any data that can nourish AI models and help them evolve has value, but private data from internet users of popular social media platforms can be exponentially valuable. DAOs part of Vana’s network will allow members to pool data accumulated from using social media platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn or X and then monetize those datasets by selling them to AI researchers.
Kazlauskas sees a lot of promise in people selling their own data because what data is available through combing the “public internet” has largely already been gobbled up and then fed into existing AI models, she said. The data created on internet platforms that require a login, like Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, etc., has considerably more value, in part because it is largely protected, she also said.
Reddit DAO launch
In April, a DAO using Vana's blockchain launched, allowing Reddit users to add their platform history to a data pool set for monetization. Kazlauskas said that Reddit users with much "karma" stood to earn as much as $300 to $BTC Start your day with the most influential events and analysis
happening across the digital asset ecosystem.
Although Vana plans to eventually be a network of more than a dozen data DAOs, the Reddit DAO is the only one fully operational as Vana’s mainnet has yet to go live, said Kazlauskas. Approximately 140,000 users joined the Reddit DAO, she also said.
In the big picture, Kazlauskas believes Vana's network of DAOs could allow people to become stakeholders in the future of artificial intelligence.
"It's about owning a stake in AI," she said. "What we've seen too, from a user-adoption perspective, it's much more compelling or interesting to give someone a stake in an AI model or a stake in this collective dataset versus 'Let me just give you $20 cash for your data.'"
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