The world is gripped by a revolution in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Generative AI systems, which produce text and media content that appears human-like, have become ubiquitous. Services like ChatGPT, from OpenAI, in particular have drawn claims of a new industrial age – with AI tipped to make imminent and ground-breaking scientific discoveries.

Amidst this upheaval, there has been an escalating scramble to secure GPUs, the compute processors which allow AI systems to quickly learn and make predictions. In past weeks, shares in Nvidia, the world’s leading GPU manufacturer, achieved a $1 trillion market capitalisation amid soaring demand.

Since 2020, Gensyn, a deep tech company, has been quietly researching such a solution, and today are announcing their $43m Series A funding round to make it a reality.  The round is led by a16z crypto, with participation from CoinFund, Protocol Labs, Canonical Crypto, Eden Block, Maven 11, Peer VC, Zee Prime, Id4, M31 Capital, and a variety of AI and Crypto venture capitalists and angels.

Gensyn is developing a compute protocol which enables developers to build state-of-the-art AI systems on any connected hardware and pay on-demand. They achieve this through a novel cryptographic verification system, which allows users to trust that the machine learning work sent across the protocol has been completed correctly – with no requirement for an intermediary.

This fresh funding brings Gensyn’s total capital raised to over $50m, and it will be used to accelerate the launch timeline and hire new talent across the company (roles here).

“We believe in computational liberty,” says Harry Grieve, Gensyn Co-founder. “Cloud oligopolists have sought rent on hardware for over a decade now – and it holds everyone back. With decentralised networks you approach things from a different perspective, there is no margin from an intermediary, value simply accrues to the network as a function of supply and demand. It also sharply increases the amount of compute supply by connecting previously underutilized hardware from around the world. Together, these points yield superior unit economics – both for AI developers and hardware owner-operators”.

“Artificial Intelligence is laying a foundation for the next industrial revolution, and the realisation of its potential requires huge computational power” says Ben Fielding, Gensyn Co-founder. “We’re harnessing the electricity of a new age and making it available to everyone at unlimited scale and fair market prices. This is essential if humanity is to embrace this technology in an equitable way, without creating huge power imbalances and dangerously biased technology serving the many but built by the few. We believe the key to useful, aligned AI is allowing everyone in the world to contribute to its development. The best way to mitigate bias and misalignment is to allow more people to build models that reflect their views. In order to do that we need open infrastructure that connects models to the core resources, crucially computational hardware, that make them function.”

“The recent advancements in AI are incredible and have the power to save the world, but substantial computational power requirements give big technology companies an advantage over startups in the race to capture AI’s value,”a16z crypto General Partner Ali Yahya noted. “We believe nobody combines the knowledge and cultural understanding of both the AI and crypto cypherpunk worlds better than Gensyn, and look forward to partnering with them to make infrastructure for AI much more widely accessible.”

CoinFund Founder Jake Brukhman commented, “CoinFund has been an early investor in deep technology at the intersection of web3 and AI, and we are extremely excited to continue to support Gensyn, a pioneer in this space, in the next stage of the company’s growth. We believe crypto primitives will make AI more open and accessible; importantly, Gensyn is championing solutions to some of the most difficult and fundamental problems found when applying crypto to AI. This round seals the company’s trajectory as a leader in decentralized AI, and we expect their innovations to lead open research and development to an inflection point.” CoinFund is one of the longest-standing cryptonative investment firms and an early backer of Gensyn.