Source: Cointelegraph
Original: “Nous Research Raises $50 Million from Paradigm to Build Decentralized AI on Solana”
Decentralized artificial intelligence (AI) startup Nous Research has raised $50 million in a Series A funding round led by crypto venture capital giant Paradigm, marking one of the largest investments to date in the intersection of blockchain and AI.
According to a report by Fortune on April 25, this funding round has valued the Nous token at $1 billion. Previous investors include Distributed Global, North Island Ventures, and Delphi Digital, which contributed to Nous's earlier $20 million seed round.
Since its inception in 2022, Nous Research has become a focal point through this latest funding round, dedicated to developing open-source AI models supported by decentralized infrastructure.
The company utilizes the Solana blockchain to coordinate and incentivize global participation in training its AI models, aiming to challenge centralized giants like OpenAI and DeepSeek.
Nous was founded by AI researchers, including Diederik Kingma, co-inventor of the Adam optimizer, and adopts an approach distinct from typical crypto AI projects.
The project does not rely on centralized data centers but allows global users to contribute idle computing power for AI training.
Blockchain technology underpins this model, ensuring security and incentivizing participation through features like Byzantine fault tolerance, while also reducing risks such as data contamination.
"Our philosophy is to create and serve the world's best AI," Nous co-founder Karan Malhotra stated in an interview with Fortune.
Reportedly, the 20-member Nous Research team will allocate most of the new funds to expand computing resources and advance research.
In December 2024, Nous revealed to Venture Beat that it is pre-training a 15 billion parameter large language model (LLM) in a decentralized manner and showcasing training progress through live streams to demonstrate transparency and performance.
Meanwhile, Paradigm's support indicates a growing interest in AI within the crypto venture capital space.
"This open, community-oriented approach stands in stark contrast to existing lab-based, centralized efforts," Paradigm partner Arjun Balaji reportedly told the media.
Paradigm is one of the largest and most successful crypto venture capital firms.
In March, Web3 data platform Kaito AI ranked Paradigm as the best-performing crypto venture capital firm over the past year, with a performance metric of 11.80%, outperforming major competitors like Alliance (10.64%), Dragonfly (8.32%), a16z (6.94%), and Multicoin Capital (5.86%).
Paradigm was co-founded by Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam and former Sequoia partner Matt Huang, establishing a strong reputation for identifying high-potential crypto projects early on.
Its portfolio includes leading decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms such as Uniswap (UNI) and dYdX, as well as ongoing support for Ethereum (ETH) scaling solution Optimism.
Paradigm also led a $255 million funding round for StarkNet, a key player in zero-knowledge rollup technology.
As of the time of publication, Paradigm had not responded to Cointelegraph's request for comment.
Related: Nvidia's accelerator program no longer accepting cryptocurrency startups.
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