OpenLedger, the sovereign data blockchain for AI, has raised $8 million in a seed round.

The funds will help OpenLedger grow its team and expand operations ahead of its blockchain network’s official testnet launch expected at the beginning of the fourth quarter, 2024.

OpenLedger announced this funding round as the broader blockchain space sees greater AI integration, with data sovereignty and digital identity key issues among users. The OpenLedger’s infrastructure offers a permissionless platform that users can leverage for control over personal data.

With the funding, the team can focus more on addressing the bottlenecks that have come with the AI boom. Per details shared in a press release, data remains one of the biggest issues as AI becomes more integral to everyday applications.

“Currently the AI industry has addressed the needs for powerful computing and algorithms, but the crucial bottleneck of data remains,” the OpenLedger team said in the press release.

As it looks to help address this, OpenLedger is providing the infrastructure and verifiable data developers need. The platform leverages EigenLayer’s technology to ensure verifiability, diversity, integrity and security of data.

“OpenLedger addresses the bottleneck of data in AI by making the infrastructure for data lifecycle verifiable, permissionless, and censorship-free!” it noted on X.

OpenLedger investors

Investors in the $8 million seed funding round included venture capital firms MH Ventures, Finality Capital, HashKey Capital, Mask Network and WAGMI Ventures.

The round also attracted leading angel investors from across the crypto space, including Eigen Labs’ Sreeram Kannan, Polygon’s Balaji Srinivasan and Sandeep Nailwal as well as Manta’s Kenny Li.

An experienced team

OpenLedger as a project is built by a team of experts from some of the world’s leading brands and blockchain ecosystems. The group wants to help advance the future of blockchain and AI across the world, and its growing traction is attracting top investment firms and backers from the Web2 and Web3 space.

The project’s team members include top minds from electronics giant Sony and retail behemoth Walmart, while in the blockchain industry, OpenLedger has attracted talent from Polygon, Hedera and Flow.

Part of the funding will go into hiring more team members, OpenLedger said.