The post Funding Roundup: HackVC leads funding round for DePIN Grass  appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Grass, a DePIN focused on verifying internet data, raised a Series A, the team exclusively told Blockworks.  HackVC led the round, with participation from Polychain, Delphi, Lattice and Brevan Howard. The team declined to disclose the amount raised but confirmed it raised $3.5 million in an earlier seed round. Wynd Labs CEO Andrej Radonjic sat down with Blockworks to talk about the raise and the project he founded alongside two other co-founders.  Radonjic said the Grass project was a concept in mid-2022, but they didn’t start building until the beginning of 2023. The pre-seed round raise actually happened right after the collapse of FTX, he noted.  Read more: Wynd Network raises $3.5M from Polychain, Tribe and more for decentralized AI project To put it simply, Grass enables data scraping using millions of nodes. “It’s a piece of infrastructure that effectively allows any company or LLM to turn the entirety of the internet into an API call. So if you’re an LLM or any model and you need data in real time, plug it into Grass, and…it’ll have online capabilities. You won’t have the issue of asking your model what happened this morning, and it says ‘I was only trained up until October’, or something like that,” Radonjic said. As AI becomes more lucrative — with a report from Bloomberg earlier this month setting OpenAI’s valuation to $150 billion — the team’s faced a question from people: “Why is Grass comfortable with open-sourcing such valuable data?” “The very obvious answer, other than giving back to the open source community, is the fact that where we see 99% of the network’s value accruing is really in live-context retrieval. So the capability of grabbing something from the information in real time,” Radonjic explained.   Read more: DePIN: A recipe for public goods on public…

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Filed under: News - @ September 21, 2024 2:25 pm