ChainOpera Inc., a blockchain company building a decentralized network and artificial intelligence operating system to accelerate AI development, said Wednesday it has raised $17 million in seed funding led by Finality Capital, Road Capital and IDG Capital.

Notable investors also participating in the round including Camford VC, ABCDE Capital, Amber Group, Modular Capital, Sparkle Ventures, AimTop Venture, Wisemont Capital, LDV Partners, Acequia Capital, PrimeSet, Plug and Play, Silicon Valley Future Capital and the USC Marshall School of Business.

A California-based startup, ChainOpera is the developer of a blockchain network that provides a decentralized platform for generative AI applications and what it calls an AI OS that allows the sharing of computational power and high-quality data. The company said its platform helps facilitate the interaction between AI developers and these decentralized resources to allow everyone to participate in the process of creating AI apps and agents while enabling users to maintain control of their data and work.

According to the company, using a blockchain network model allows users to co-own and co-create decentralized AI agents and apps. It calls its platform a federated AI OS, meaning that it’s separated over multiple different nodes, each of which verifies and validates the data. That allows the creation, deployment and management of AI agents and rewards for every participant for their contributions. For example, contributors could provide data, models and graphics processing unit compute resources for serving models and earn tokens.

“ChainOpera actively supports diverse AI applications with unique tokenomics,” said Dr. Aiden He, co-founder and president of ChainOpera AI. “We see large language model-based AI Agents as just one form of AI software, envisioning Personal AI OS with multimodal models and on-device federated learning as powerful digital companions to expand the blockchain AI community.”

The company said providing an incentive for developers will lead them to create more templates and AI agent builders reward developers for creating templates to deploy. This helps produce the foundation for a more diverse marketplace where a greater number of templates can be taken by other developers to customize and turn them into more specialized AI agents and task-specific generative AI models.

ChainOpera’s AI mobile app features what the company calls a “type to earn” capability “AI Terminal” that allows users to share private data to receive token rewards for large language models and generative AI model training. The AI Terminal also allows users to trade AI tokens through ChainOpera’s platform for other cryptocurrencies and acts as a personal AI companion that can complete various tasks and answer questions. The company said it intends to grow the AI Terminal into a full-fledged AI copilot and operating system.

According to ChainOpera, the ecosystem has 7,000 AI model developers. The company plans a broad release of its flagship platform and mobile app featuring AI agents in the coming weeks.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer