Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently a big narrative. AI is also making a grand entrance into the blockchain space. This didn’t go unnoticed by some big crypto VCs. They’re jumping on board some early-stage projects. Some don’t even have a token yet.
So, let’s find out which AI coins pique the interest of these big VCs.
1) Pinecone
Pinecone got on the radar of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). In a Series B funding round, they raised $100 million. This raised Pinecone’s value to $750 million.
In 2021, they already managed to secure a $10 million seed investment. Wing Venture Capital led this seed round. This was followed by a Series A round in 2022 of $28 million. Menlo Ventures led this round.
Source: Twitter
So, what is Pinecone all about that makes VCs seemingly tumble over them? Most current AI narratives are generative. However, Pinecone delivers the infrastructure underneath these apps. Pinecone offers a Vector Database. In short, it offers AI a way to understand information and maintain a long-term memory of it. For example, this is useful and important when it deals with complex tasks.
Furthermore, it makes a database scalable and cost-efficient. As a result, thousands of AI teams already use this tech. Pinecone managed already to raise a whopping $138 million.
So, it’s interesting to see that the AI infrastructure section now also gets funding. For example, Magnetar Capital raised $221 million in April 2023 for Core Weave. They also offer a flexible cloud infrastructure. With this, you can train LLMs for AI.
Source: Twitter
2) Numbers (NUM)
Binance Lab is one of the backers of Numbers Protocol. The team raised most of its funding in 2021. In 15 rounds, they managed to raise $6.4 million. On the other hand, Binance Labs already invested in Numbers back in January 2020. It appears that the team has changed its vision since its first funding rounds. Currently, they’re much more involved in the AI narrative.
Source: Twitter
One of their key focus areas is social media and the spreading of fake news. But, for example, they can also help to authenticate NFTs. Besides authenticating digital media, they can also address ownership. As a result, the Numbers protocol has quite a few use cases:
- Covering the 2020 US presidential elections.
- Cataloging and preserving war crime evidence in Ukraine.
- Allow creators to monetize their work.
- Protect ownership of digital assets.
- Address issues of copyright.
- A fair distribution of royalties.
So, out of the three AI coins or projects discussed here, they’re the only one who already has a token. The current price of NUM is $0.0372. It has a $17 million market cap. There’s a max supply of 1 billion tokens. The circulating supply is around 458 million tokens. It’s available on, for instance, KuCoin, Gate.io, MEXC, or Huobi. If you prefer a DEX, PancakeSwap, and Uniswap V2 on Ethereum also offer this token. The video below gives a short but good description of the Numbers protocol.
3) Gensyn
With Gensyn, we’re back at a16z. They led a Series A funding round of $43 million only a few days ago. Gensyn provides computing resources for AI platforms. Developers can build AI systems in:
- Small data centers.
- Gaming computers.
- Other connected hardware.
Source: Twitter
Furthermore, it allows payment options on demand. It also has a system in place that works without middlemen. This way, you can find out that all the shared work on the protocol was completed correctly. So, Gensyn covers the machine learning narrative. It unites the world’s computational power and unites this into a global super cluster. Anyone can access this at any time. As a result, it offers:
- A cost-efficient peer-to-peer platform.
- Hyper scalability. Any device, all over the world, can connect.
- A permissionless platform.
This results in a marketplace for computational power. So, this can be to such a small level, that it can even include mobile phones. This way, the available computing power can be x10 to even x100. In the end, all this will benefit machine learning.
Source: Twitter
Conclusion
AI is currently one of the hottest narratives. There are also plenty of AI protocols that use blockchain tech. As a result, we now see that big VCs are starting to fund AI start-ups. We found 3 Top AI coins and protocols, funded by big VCs. Pinecone and Gensyn received funding by a16z. Binance Labs was an early investor in Numbers Protocol.
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