Insider Brief
- Prodia raises $15M in a seed round led by Dragonfly Capital to develop scalable, affordable AI solutions using a distributed network of GPUs powered by Web3.
- The company offers high-performance, low-cost AI inference solutions, democratizing access to advanced AI technologies and addressing the limitations of centralized infrastructure.
- Founded by Monty Anderson, Mikhail Avady, and Shawn Wilkinson, Prodia aims to make AI integration easy for developers, with plans to expand into generative video and support for more LLMs.
PRESS RELEASE — ATLANTA/July 2, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Prodia, the leading distributed network of GPUs for AI inference solutions, today announced it raised a $15M seed round led by Dragonfly Capital to build more scalable, affordable AI solutions powered by Web3. Investment firms HashKey, Web3.com, Index Ventures, Symbolic Capital, OKX Ventures, EV3, Artichoke, TRGC, Folius, Tangent Capital, Southern Equity, Balaji Srinivasan, Sandeep Nailwal (founder of Polygon), Matthew Roszak, Jeremy Voss (Director of Gen AI at Meta), Amit Vasudev (founder of Clearbit), Thomas France founder of Ledger, Leon Marshall (CEO of Galaxy Europe), Nicolas Pinto, Kenzi Wang, Jermaine Brown and others.
Demand for high-performance computing is outpacing today’s centralized infrastructure’s ability to provide affordable, scalable solutions. Prodia helps solve this critical problem through its pioneering use of distributed, Web3 infrastructure. By leveraging a distributed network of GPUs, Prodia is uniquely positioned to offer both higher performance and lower costs compared to traditional cloud services. This approach not only taps into the unused computing power across the globe, but also democratizes access to state-of-the-art AI technologies.
This architectural choice is not merely optimal — it is essential since it provides the structural foundation that makes Prodia’s high-performance, low-cost AI inference solutions possible. This transformative approach marks a significant departure from conventional methods, positioning Prodia at the forefront of the next wave of AI infrastructure development.
Prodia was founded by Monty Anderson, Mikhail Avady, and Shawn Wilkinson — previously the founder of the world’s largest decentralized cloud storage company, Storj. With a vision of making AI more accessible, they built the most efficient compute engine in the world for AI via their distributed cloud. With a simple API, developers can integrate the latest models into their app within hours.
“Every single software company will have a generative AI component to their app in some form,” said Shawn Wilkinson, CEO of Prodia. “We have made it so easy to add AI into any application that our customers don’t even need to know what a GPU is. This is what sets us apart and why the top AI generation companies choose Prodia over the nightmare of fighting for machines on AWS or self hosting,” added Mikhail Avady, co-founder of Prodia.
The new financing will fuel the next phase of the company’s growth, including expansion into generative video and support for more LLMs. In addition, the funding will be used to help with expanding the Prodia network to support more types of GPU hardware and more types of providers.
“We believe Prodia sits at the vanguard of the generative AI transformation. Their API has bleeding-edge inference capabilities and we are thrilled to see their progress in making high-performance inference available for all,” said Anirudh Pai, Partner at Dragonfly.
Prodia also recently launched their new low latency API for enterprise customers, reaching best in class inference speeds in the world.
“Using tech like JWTs, gossip protocols, and connection pooling, we’ve built the fastest inference orchestration tool. It acts as a distributed system to deliver high efficiency and availability with minimal latency,” said Monty Anderson, co-founder of Prodia.
Prodia Resources:
- Website: https://prodia.com
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/prodialabs
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/prodia-labs
- Careers: https://jobs.prodia.com
- Join the network: https://prodia.com/network
About Prodia
Prodia is a distributed GPU cloud specifically designed for AI inference. Delivering high-performance cloud services, Prodia reduces costs by 50% — 90% and accelerates generation speeds, all while providing an easy-to-use Rest API for effortless integration. Powering the largest media generators, Prodia leads the way in being the best solution for applications at scale. For more information, visit https://prodia.com/.
About Dragonfly Capital
Dragonfly is a global crypto venture capital and research firm. The firm invests in seed, venture, and growth-stage companies across the entire crypto ecosystem, including DeFi, CeFi, infrastructure, L1 and L2s, NFTs, creator/consumer and GambleFi sectors. Dragonfly leverages its global market knowledge, global empirical research, and diversity of financial, technical and operations experts to empower the most innovative crypto companies with the strategies, relationships, and tools for lasting success. Founded in 2018 and operating in 12 countries, Dragonfly has about $2.5B AUM.
For more information, visit https://www.dragonfly.xyz/
