Sahara AI Ltd., a startup building a decentralized platform for artificial intelligence data using blockchain technology, today announced it has raised $43 million in early-stage funding co-led by Pantera Capital, Binance Labs and Polychain Capital.

The Series A funding round also attracted investments from Samsung, Alumni Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Matrix Partners, dao5, Geekcartel, Nomad Capital, SCB 10X, Canonical Capital, Mirana Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Dispersion Capital, Aegis Ventures, Tangent Ventures and others. This funding follows a $6 million seed round led by Alumni Ventures and Polychain earlier this year.

Sahara aims to handle emerging issues with copyright, privacy and resource management when it comes to AI training data by allowing users and data contributors to secure ownership of their contributions. This is done by providing attribution for their information that can be recognizably controlled even after it’s ingested into AI models during the training and fine-tuning processes using decentralized blockchain technology.

The company’s blockchain-based AI platform allows anyone, from developers to large enterprises, to participate in a model that permits them to subscribe to data markets where contributors can receive fair compensation for their work. AI models depend heavily on human-generated data to operate properly.

In the beginning, many AI models were trained on large swaths of publicly available data from the internet including public domain works. However, some training data for popular enterprise models also comes from unattributed copyrighted sources. Artists, writers and others want to be fairly compensated for their work when it is used in AI training and Sahara believes that by giving them the tools to tag and transparently control their ownership before and when it is used in an AI model that will increase their involvement.

“There is often no transparency on how users’ proprietary models and agents are used by these centralized AI providers, and no protection or compensation for users’ contributions,” Sahara AI co-founder and Chief Executive Sean Ren told Reuters. “Ethical concerns over copyright, privacy, resource access, and economic imbalances continue to grow as AI becomes more widely adopted and capable.”

Sahara calls what it’s building a “collaborative AI economy” that enables fair monetization and recognition while providing a library of diverse human-generated content for enterprise AI providers in need. By making the process as collaborative, open and accessible as possible to contributors and those in need of training data on the other end, the company is hoping to benefit everyone involved in the process.

According to the company’s website, Sahara AI has worked with over 31 enterprise clients and assisted with the development of more than 30,000 vetted AI trainers. Since its founding in 2023, Sahara has collaborated with several high-profile enterprise tech firms, including Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Snap Inc.

The company’s testnet, which will allow developers to test AI applications on its application, and mainnet, which will signify the full launch of the platform, are expected to come online in the coming months.

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