Prime Intellect raised $5.5 million in seed funding

CoinFund and Distributed Global lead $5.5 million seed round for decentralized AI firm Prime Intellect

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Quick Take

Prime Intellect raised $5.5 million in seed funding co-led by Distributed Global and CoinFund.
The firm is building out scalable decentralized AI development infrastructure.
Prime Intellect plans to create a decentralized protocol for ownership over collaboratively trained AI models.

The decentralized artificial intelligence firm Prime Intellect raised $5.5 million seed funding.

CoinFund and Distributed Global co-led the round, which saw additional support from Compound, Collab+Currency, Protocol Labs, Erik Voorhees of Shapeshift, Worldcoin's DCBuilder, Coinbase's Joe Lallouz, Huggingface's Clem Delangue, SemiAnalysis's Dylan Patel, Nous Research's Shivani Mitra and others.

Prime Intellect is building out scalable decentralized AI development infrastructure. Prime Intellect's platform, live in beta, aggregates the global supply of centralized and decentralized GPU providers to enable on-demand computing at a low cost, according to the firm's website. The firm then wants to launch a decentralized protocol letting users own parts of the AI models they helped collaboratively train.

"Generative AI could hit $1.3 trillion by 2032, but progress is already bottlenecked by centralized models of control," CoinFund wrote on social media Tuesday. "Prime Intellect is a decentralized AI platform leveraging distributed model training to democratize compute power- fostering collaboration and incentivizing ownership for all."

Prime Intellect was co-founded by Vincent Weisser, who previously served as Chief of Ecosystem and AI at Molecule, a tokenization and funding platform for biopharma intellectual property. Prime Intellect's other co-founder Johannes Hagemann built large language models for the past two years at the German AI startup Aleph Alpha, according to his website.

"The Prime Intellect protocol will offer the infrastructure and crypto-economic building blocks for decentralized AI development, rewarding contributions and enabling collective governance of AI models and the value they generate," the firm wrote on social media.

CoinFund also led an $11.5 million Series A round in January for Digital Infrastructure Inc, a firm developing a decentralized car data network. Distributed Global and CoinFund also co-led a $14 million Series A round for the asset manager Superstate in November 2023, The Block previously reported.

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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.