LONDON, March 28, 2024 – FLock.io, a Web3 training and fine-tuning startup, today announced the closing of a £4.76M ($6M) seed round led by Lightspeed Faction and Tagus Capital with participation from DCG, OKX Ventures, Volt Capital, and more. The company intends to utilize this investment towards the continuous development of its machine learning and federated learning platform, aiming to fulfill its mission of transferring AI governance from centralized corporations to users. 

FLock.io is a decentralized machine-learning platform that incentivizes model specialization based on community preference and proprietary data. The London-based startup invites the general public to collaborate, contribute knowledge, and enrich AI models on its community platform. 

Created by a team of Oxford alumni with 10+ years of industry and research experience in AI and crypto, this incentivized platform seeks to redefine AI model training and fine-tuning by halting user data collection, preserving privacy, and encouraging widespread governance participation. 

Jiahao Sun, CEO at FLock.io, said, “With FLock, now anyone can contribute to AI development by offering compute, data, or training scripts; the barrier to participation is much lower. This results in community-owned models built by the many, not just the few, with data contributors being fairly rewarded.”

At the top of FLock’s agenda is to roll out its federated-learning-powered training platform in Q2 of this year, which incentivizes the machine-learning community to compete in an open leaderboard. The training tasks are sponsored by a diverse group of communities, which set the reward criteria for each model.

Visit www.flock.io to learn more about how to collaborate, contribute knowledge, and enrich AI models on its community platforms.

Investor Quotes

Clara Boh, Deal Partner at Lightspeed Faction, spoke about the recent investment stating, “The rapid growth of AI has been met with increasing data privacy and regulatory concerns. By combining blockchain and federated learning technologies, FLock seeks to solve this and unlock broader participation in AI model training. We are excited to be a part of FLock’s mission to redefine AI innovation through its decentralized training and finetuning platform.”

Gui Silva, General Partner at Tagus Capital said, “FLock is an innovative company that leverages blockchain technology and federated learning to train and fine-tune AI models without transferring users’ data to centralised servers, ensuring that data remains under users’ control, never leaving their devices. We remain impressed by Jiahao’s significant research contributions to leading academic journals, and his extensive experience in traditional finance, having served as a Director of A.I. at one of the top financial institutions. He and FLock have assembled a talented team of experts in AI and cryptography, and they have been building something truly remarkable.”

About Lightspeed Faction
Lightspeed Faction is the leading blockchain-native venture capital firm that merges Silicon Valley VC experience with deep blockchain expertise. Faction typically invests in early-stage startups across the blockchain ecosystem that are in their Seed or Series A funding rounds. Faction is firmly committed to the growth of the crypto space, investing in projects with the potential to meaningfully contribute to and advance the industry and society at large.
For more information, please visit: https://www.faction.vc 

About Lightspeed Faction’s Relationship with Lightspeed
Faction Ventures, LLC (“Faction”) and Lightspeed Management Company, L.L.C. (“Lightspeed”) are separate businesses that operate independently of each other. Faction is a registered investment adviser under the United States Investment Advisers Act of 1940, as amended. Faction advises its own fund(s) and does not advise any Lightspeed clients, and Lightspeed does not advise Faction or any of its clients. 

About Tagus Capital
Tagus Capital is a blockchain-native venture capital firm specializing in Web3 DeepTech Ventures. We back visionary entrepreneurs who are at the forefront of technology advances, combining blockchain with cutting-edge technologies such as Quantum Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Reversible Computing, Machine Learning, and Robotics. Tagus operates primarily in the UK and Europe and has a strong network within the Web3 grassroots ecosystem and university spinoffs.
For more information, please visit: www.taguscap.com