The Enigma of Sentiment Top VCs Rush to Invest 85 Million in Seed Round

Reported by Coin World:
Written by: 0xjs@
Despite the recent bleak trend in the cryptocurrency market due to factors such as Mt.Gox compensation and the sale of BTC by the German/American government, VCs continue to bet on the cryptocurrency market. Data also shows that cryptocurrency projects obtained over $160 million in financing on July 2, 2024.
Among these projects, Sentient stands out, with one company raising $85 million, accounting for half of the total financing. In addition, the $85 million financing of Sentient has two particularly remarkable features. First, it is a seed round of financing, jokingly referred to by netizens as “redefining the seed round.” Second, the investors are notably luxurious, with Silicon Valley’s renowned investor Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund leading the investment, with Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures co-leading, and other well-known VCs participating (including Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, Primitive Ventures, IDG Capital, Sky9 Capital, and HashKey Capitalo).
So, who is Sentient? What kind of project is it? Why can it attract such large-scale investment from top VCs?
According to the Sentient Foundation, Sentient is an AI research organization dedicated to building a new Open AGI economy for AI builders and creators. Sentient is building a platform and protocol that will allow open-source AI developers to (1) monetize their models, data, and other innovations, (2) collaborate to build powerful AI, and (3) become important stakeholders in the new Open AGI economy. Sentient envisions that the development of AI in the future will be open and transparent, with access and monetization being decentralized.
Based on the disclosed information, Sentient’s technical details are scarce, with only a few rough ideas. Sentient will build an AI platform, with AI developers as the main participants, to build powerful AI products through innovation and collaboration, relying on the underlying blockchain and incentive mechanisms to provide economic coordination to achieve Open AGI. The AI models hosted on Sentient are “open, monetizable, and loyal” (OML). These OML models will drive the shared Open AGI economy, supporting millions of AI agents and billions of downstream applications for AI users.
According to Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon and AggLayer, Sentient will be built on Polygon Agglayer. The core members of Sentient include Sandeep Nailwal, Sreeram Kannan, Pramod Viswanath, a professor of Web3 at Princeton, and Himanshu Tyagi, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISC). They are the founders of successful crypto projects (Polygon and EigenLayer) and well-known professors in the academic community, which explains the large investment from top VCs.
Various VC leaders who participated in the seed round investment in Sentient have also come forward to discuss the reasons behind their investment. They believe that Sentient’s technology and approach will pave the way for a new era of AI, promoting open, community-governed AGI to enhance innovation, collaboration, and transparency.
In the long run, open systems are superior to closed systems, and Sentient aims to ensure that Open AI can defeat OpenAI. This integration heralds the arrival of a new era, where embracing principles of decentralization, transparency, and collective ownership is essential.