Nodepay, a decentralized artificial intelligence platform that pays people for unused internet bandwidth by turning it into real-time data pipelines for training, announced today it has raised new funding, bringing its total to $7 million.

Today’s funding round brought in new strategic investors, including IDG Capital, Mythos, Elevate Ventures, IBC, Optic Capital and Funders.VC. They joined existing investors such as Animoca Brands, Mirana, OKX Ventures, JUMP Crypto, Tokenbay Capital and others.

The company provides privacy-protected nodes that allow users to share spare internet bandwidth to its network by creating a real-time data source to improve AI inference with accurate, timely information. It also allows users to assist with the training data for AI models with reinforcement learning feedback, which helps refine training data based on the responses of actual humans, making models more responsive and accurate over time.

Currently, data produced by users is scraped by AI providers from the open internet for free, this includes text produced by users on blogs, social media, and anywhere comments are made. Most average users don’t use all of their bandwidth all at once, Nodepay uses some of that unused bandwidth to search the internet for new publicly accessible human-generated data to assist with AI training.

The greater the volume of publicly available data collected, the more robust and accurate the information becomes, making it more useful for researchers and AI developers.

“Our mission is to develop solutions that create tangible value for both AI developers and its end users,” said co-founder Darren Nguyen. “We give contributors a share in the AI ecosystem they help fundamentally build.”

Users can run a node using a Chrome extension, currently in beta mode, that runs a node on their PCs. It provides access to the various services of Nodepay, including passive bandwidth use. The company stressed that every node is privacy-aware and only scrapes publicly accessible data from the internet and will not track online activity, access passwords, search history or view any sensitive data.

Under the hood, Nodepay uses blockchain technology to provide decentralized services and validate transactions. Blockchain allows multiple nodes to work in concert to verify transactions without needing a centralized authority. It also allows the system to reward users using cryptocurrency.

Through the use platform, users earn Node Points, a reward system that can be exchanged for cryptocurrency tokens for every hour theyre connected. Users can also use the points to access AI capabilities such as a decentralized AI search engine, integration with large language models and more.

The company said that with this funding, it will continue to commercialize its infrastructure to benefit its own community through providing incentives for data collection and offering that data to its AI model partners. Nodepay already serves more than 1.5 million active users worldwide, according to the website. The company added that it’s preparing to launch on Solana, a major blockchain network.

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