Web3 AI training firm FLock raises $6 million in seed funding

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Quick Take

The web3 artificial intelligence training firm FLock raised $6 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Faction and Tagus Capital.
FLock will use the funds to grow its team and develop an AI training platform powered by federated learning.

FLock, a web3 startup that decentralizes artificial intelligence training, raised $6 million in seed funding.

Venture firms Lightspeed Faction and Tagus Capital led the round, which included participation from DCG, OKX Ventures and Volt Capital, among others. The seed round brings FLock's total funding raised to $8 million, the firm's CEO Jiahao Sun told The Block. Sun added that FLock's board of directors will not change following the round since FLock is still at a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) stage.

FLock, intentionally stylized that way, will use the funds to grow its team and develop an AI training platform powered by federated learning — a decentralized machine learning approach that emphasizes data privacy. Sun said FLock uses an open leaderboard to incentivize competition in the machine learning community and sponsored training tasks that set reward criteria for each model.

"As we continue to grow and expand our platform, we are excited to witness the transformative impact of decentralized AI across various industries, from healthcare and finance to education and beyond," Sun said. "We believe that the future of AI lies in the power of decentralized communities, and we are proud to be at the forefront of this revolution."

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MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.