Sentient, an open-source artificial intelligence development platform with Polygon MATIC +1.03% co-founder Sandeep Nailwal as one of its core contributors, has raised $85 million in a seed funding round.

Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures co-led the mega round, Sentient said Tuesday. Other investors in the round included Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, HashKey Capital, Canonical Crypto and Foresight Ventures.

Sentient began raising funds for the seed round in March of this year and closed it in May, Nailwal told The Block in an interview. He declined to comment on the structure of the round and valuation.

Nailwal is one of Sentient's four core contributors, alongside two distinguished professors and an AI venture development startup. The professors are Pramod Viswanath, the Forrest G. Hamrick Professor of Engineering at Princeton University and co-inventor of Flash OFDM, the technology behind the 4G wireless standard, and Himanshu Tyagi, a Professor of Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science. The startup, Sensys, was founded by Kenzi Wang, co-founder of Symbolic Capital, and aims to support startups within the Sentient ecosystem.

When asked why he would focus on a new project, Nailwal said he wanted Polygon to expand in AI. Nailwal and Wang had been discussing AI efforts on their side, and Viswanath and Tyagi were also exploring the area from their side. The four were later united last October by Sreeram Kannan, founder and CEO of EigenLayer, Nailwal said. Kannan was a student of Viswanath and has been Sentient's advisor since day one, Tyagi noted in the interview.

Sentient is building open-source AI models with community contributions. "AI today is becoming incredibly centralized, and the safety and ethics of AI are also questionable," Nailwal said. "So community-built AI models are the key."

Tyagi said Sentient aims to compete directly with OpenAI. He added that Sentient's community-built approach distinguishes it from OpenAI. While OpenAI restricts users to building applications without direct access to its model, Sentient will allow users to access and contribute to the model itself, Tyagi said, adding that Sentient will also reward contributors. 

Sentient will launch "campaigns" for contributors, with each campaign having specific metrics for evaluating contributions and rewards based on these metrics, Tyagi said. Rewards will be provided "in various forms, including co-ownership of the AI model they help create and future rewards on its usage," he added.

"Currently, anyone is able to just copy models without paying for them, and Sentient aims to solve this incentive problem which disincentivizes open source AI," Joey Krug, partner at Founders Fund, said in a statement. "This is a really interesting research area and we're thrilled to support the team at Sentient as they make this vision a reality."

When asked if Sentient could also reward contributors with its own token, Nailwal said the project doesn't have a token planned but will decide when its community grows.

As for how Polygon will be integrated with Sentient, Nailwal said Sentient will be building on Polygon, most likely creating its own chain via the Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK), a modular software toolkit for developers to launch new Layer 2 networks on Ethereum.

Sentient is expected to launch its testnet in the third quarter of this year. With fresh funding in place, the project looks to continue building its platform. "AI is capital-intensive, and talent is very costly," Nailwal said of raising the big seed round. Fewer than 20 people are working for Sentient across the U.S. and India, and the project looks to hire around 10 people soon across research and engineering functions, Tyagi said.

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