San Francisco-based open-source artificial intelligence development platform Sentient today announced that it has raised $85 million in a seed funding round to topple the dominance of centralized AI model development in the industry.

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures co-led the colossal funding round. Other investors participating in the round included Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, HashKey Capital, Canonical Crypto and Foresight Ventures.

Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, a blockchain network scaling solution designed to resolve Ethereum blockchain scaling issues, has been working as one of the core contributors to Sentient. He has been working alongside several other core contributors. They include Professor Pramod Viswanath from Princeton University, co-inventor of Flash OFDM, the technology behind the 4G wireless standard, and Professor Himanshu Tyagi from the Indian Institute of Science.

Another core contributor is the AI studio startup Sensys, founded by Kenzi Wang, co-founder of Symbolic Capital. The company will act to support companies working within the Sentient ecosystem with.

“The rapid advancement of AI has the potential to transform every aspect of our lives, but the concentration of power in the hands of a few centralized entities poses significant risks,” Nailwal said in a statement. “By building an open platform for AGI development, we aim to ensure that the benefits of AI are distributed equitably and that its development aligns with the interests of humanity as a whole.”

Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is a theoretical field of AI research aimed at producing software capable of performing at human-like levels of intelligence. To this date, it has been considered the “holy grail” of AI as it would unlock the capability of producing truly capable, widely task-oriented AI assistants that would be able to perform at human levels.

So far, most development and research into AGI has been shuttered behind closed doors by big firms because they can marshal tremendous resources. Closed-source models also pose a problem in that all of the parameters and variables that go into producing the large language model cannot be examined, verified or distributed by third parties and remain entirely under the control of centralized authorities.

To combat this, Sentient intends to build an AI platform for contributors to collaborate and monetize their innovations in a way that will catalyze a path toward the evolution of what the company calls “Open AGI.” It will use blockchain technology to incentivize people to build, copy and expand on AI models and receive rewards for pioneering builds of AI agents and models as part of mass collaboration.

“Currently, anyone can just copy models without paying for them, and Sentient aims to solve this incentive problem which disincentivizes open-source AI,” said Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund. “This is a really interesting research area.”

Sentient enters the testnet phase this quarter and intends to use the funds from this round to hire experts to expand its team, including AI talent and blockchain engineering.

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