Zero Gravity Labs Raises $40M for Decentralized AI Operating System

The seed round included contributions from Hack VC, Delphi Digital, OKX Ventures, Polygon and Animoca Brands

Web3 startup Zero Gravity Labs (0GL) has announced a $40 million seed funding round to develop a decentralized AI operating system (dAIOS).

The funding round was led by several major crypto investors, including Hack VC, Delphi Digital, OKX Ventures, Polygon and its founder Sandeep Nailwal, and Animoca Brands and its founder Yat Siu. The round also included participation from IOSG Ventures, HashKey, Silicon Valley executives Gokul Rajaram and Balaji Srinivasan, and executives from Web3 gaming firm Limit Break.

0GL previously raised a $35 million pre-seed round in March, and the latest funding will be used to further develop and launch the dAIOS, according to an emailed announcement on Monday.

The dAIOS is designed to provide a decentralized environment for massive datasets to power AI computation, enabling Web3 applications to access and utilize AI models.

“The vision for 0GL is to create a decentralized operating system for AI that will enable anyone to build, deploy, and scale AI applications in a Web3 environment,” 0GL founder and CEO Mohit Sharma told CoinDesk in an email.

Sharma added that the seed funding will also be used to expand the 0GL team and build out the community around the project.

“We believe that decentralized AI is the next frontier for Web3, and we are excited to be working with 0GL to bring this vision to life,” Hack VC founder and managing partner Alex Pack said in the announcement.

The proliferation of AI tools in the last couple of years has prompted many blockchain projects to explore how decentralization can be applied to artificial intelligence to prevent huge datasets being concentrated under the auspices of just a few powerful entities.

Whether or not there is a use case for such projects remains to be seen, but it is evident that the great and the good of crypto VC are willing to spend tens of millions of dollars finding out.