Insider Brief
- Hyperbolic raised $7 million in seed funding led by Polychain Capital and Lightspeed Faction to advance its open-access AI cloud and expand its team.
- The platform offers a cost-effective AI inference service and plans to develop a decentralized GPU marketplace powered by blockchain technology.
- Hyperbolic’s innovative solutions aim to democratize AI by making powerful computing resources accessible and verifiable for developers and researchers globally.
PRESS RELEASE — SAN FRANCISCO/July 30, 2024 — We’re thrilled to announce the close of a $7M seed round led by Polychain Capital and Lightspeed Faction. The round includes additional participation from Chapter One, LongHash, Bankless Ventures, Republic Digital, Nomad Capital, CoinSummer Labs, Third Earth Capital, and notable angel investors like Balaji Srinivasan, Illia Polosukhin, Sandeep Nailwal, Casey Caruso, Tekin Salimi, Santiago Santos. The capital will be utilized to advance the development of our open-access AI cloud, including hiring key engineers and creating a supportive ecosystem for developers.
This seed round builds on a pre-seed investment of $725K from Chapter One, Modular Capital, Samsung Next, Blizzard Fund by Avalanche, IMO Ventures, SNZ Holding, and Ausvic Capital in November 2022.
Yuchen Jin, Co-Founder and CTO at Hyperbolic, notes “We are thankful of our investors who align with our vision of simplifying and expanding access to AI Cloud capabilities with a single, cost-effective solution. The AI industry remains in its early stages and we’re confident that Hyperbolic will play a crucial role as a reliable infrastructure partner that drives forward the next iteration of the industry’s life cycle.”
Currently, AI companies are reportedly spending over 80% of their capital on compute resources, without a cost-effective solution on the market, and causing an industry-wide bottleneck due to cost and distribution challenges. Hyperbolic’s solution addresses this issue by creating a scalable system to aggregate global GPU compute and leveraging blockchain technology to ensure their network of nodes operates in a verifiable and secure manner. We aspire to be the foundation for companies to develop open, safe, and verifiable superintelligence, mitigating concerns about monopolization by a single entity.
Olaf Carlson-Wee, Founder and CEO of Polychain Capital, commented: “Hyperbolic invites the world to fight against the abuse of power by a select few, advocating for a transparent future through open AI development. Without this transparency, auditing profit-focused tech giants becomes exceedingly difficult. Hyperbolic envisions a future where distributed compute makes services like inference cheaper, enabling researchers and developers globally to experiment at larger scales.”
Hyperbolic’s first product is an AI inference service that promises to deliver high performance at a fraction of the cost. Unlike traditional models that rely on single GPU types, our approach, known as ‘heterogeneous compute’, uses a compiling stack to optimize tensor operators across various hardware backends, including Nvidia and AMD GPUs. This innovative method allows builders and researchers to access powerful open-source AI models through a simple API call, achieving performance comparable to well-known centralized solutions. Developers can leverage Hyperbolic’s platform to run inference and build applications using models such as Large Language Models like Llama 3.1 405B, Vision Language Models like Cambrian, Audio Generation models like MeloTTS, and image generation models like Stable Diffusion.
Anyone can begin running inference for FREE at app.hyperbolic.xyz/models.
Verification and confidentiality are common unresolved issues in AI services like inference, particularly with closed-source companies, where it is difficult to verify and audit the models provided to clients. Hyperbolic addresses this with their novel Proof of Sampling (PoSP) protocol, developed in collaboration with UC Berkeley and Columbia University. This protocol ensures high security by incentivizing network participants to act honestly, guaranteeing that contributors provide the correct GPUs and generate accurate results for the models requested by users.
We are also building a GPU marketplace which offers an intuitive and automated interface for anyone to rent and supply GPUs in seconds. This scalable system maximizes the performance of any kind of GPU and is powered by Hyperbolic’s decentralized orchestration layer, or Hyperbolic Distributed Operating System (Hyper-dOS).
We are currently inviting community members to join the waitlist to test our alpha product at app.hyperbolic.xyz/compute.
Jasper (Yue) Zhang, Co-Founder and CEO at Hyperbolic, added, “Our vision is clear: the future of AI is collaborative. We’re a team of researchers and developers dedicated to making AI services easily accessible, verifiable, and trusted. This is the core of our mission, and we invite the AI and Web3 community to join us in this pursuit. Hyperbolic is your rainforest to explore, build, and innovate in ways you never thought possible. Our community of builders are unique players in that ecosystem, but together we grow that rainforest and win.”
Looking ahead, we plan to launch our novel Proof of Sampling (PoSP) protocol on an interoperable blockchain, forming the backbone of Hyperbolic’s decentralized network of nodes. Embracing the motto “Everyone wins when everyone contributes,” we’re building an economy where every contributor to the platform can benefit from its success.
Zhang concluded, “Hyperbolic’s dual focus on GPU accessibility and open-access AI services sets it apart in the industry, promising a collaborative future for AI development. As they expand their GPU Marketplace and develop AI services for developers and researchers worldwide, the team is just scratching the surface of what’s possible.”
About Hyperbolic
Hyperbolic is a leading provider of open access AI computing and inference services, pioneering open access to AI for developers and researchers worldwide. With a mission to break down barriers that limit AI’s potential, Hyperbolic believes in a future where AI technology is universally accessible, empowering every individual and community with the tools to innovate, create, and advance our world. The Hyperbolic founding team is led by award-winning Math and AI researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of Washington.
Website | X | Discord | LinkedIn | YouTube | GitHub | Documentation
About Polychain Capital
Polychain Capital is a leading investment firm dedicated to investing in blockchain technology and decentralized finance. Since its founding in 2016, Polychain Capital has focused on backing transformative projects that leverage blockchain to disrupt traditional industries and create innovative financial systems. With a deep understanding of the crypto landscape, Polychain Capital supports visionary entrepreneurs and cutting-edge technologies, driving the growth and adoption of decentralized networks and protocols. For more information, visit www.polychain.capital.
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.
