Blockchain startup Fetch.ai raises $40 million to provide monetization and other tools for AI-generated information

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AI is riding high on a curve of hype, which means that some of the practical questions that may become louder over time – the many costs (financial and social), the business models – may not be the most central right now. Today, a startup called Fetch.ai is announcing $40 million in funding in anticipation of when it shifts.

The startup, based in Cambridge, England, says it is building tools focused on “autonomous agents, network infrastructure and decentralized machine learning” that help enable communication and actions between AI applications, the idea being to make the work produced by them more actionable .

CEO Humayun Sheikh said in an interview that he also believes there is a role for Fetch.ai to play in creating learning models, providing a more fair and traceable approach to AI using distributed ledgers for entities to feed data into these the models. .

Until now, a large part of the work Fetch has done is in the area of ​​IP and technology development (it already has a number of patent applications and patents issued in the US and Europe).

But there are also some aspects of Fetch.ai’s platform already live – Fetch.ai is built on blockchain technology and it has created a FET token that will be used on the platform. Earlier this week, it launched a “Notiphi” notification feature for use in conjunction with the Fetch wallet. But these are only parts of what looks like a very ambitious road map. Sheikh said the capital it is announcing today will be invested in this effort as Fetch prepares to launch commercial services later this year.

The funding is a significant amount in the current market, and it comes from a single company, DWF Labs, an incubator linked to an entity called Digital Wave Finance. The latter company is described by DWF Labs as a “top 5 cryptocurrency trading entity by volume”, although ironically I have been unable to find any trace of it on the internet, nor was a spokesperson able to provide me with any online Links.

DWF Labs, meanwhile, was in the news last week as well for putting $40 million into a startup called Tomi that aimed to build a distributed “alternative internet,” and in November 2022 it also backed TON, the blockchain that originally part of Telegram, but re-emerged as a separate project after the original effort collapsed.

The capital behind Fetch.ai might not be the most traditional, but Sheikh insisted to me that his startup is far from being another crypto startup. Using Fetch.ai to build AI models, he believes, is one example of how blockchain can be used for non-financial purposes.

“The ability for people to train models on their own is difficult because you need money,” he said, referring to the divide in the AI ​​world between the well-capitalized “haves” and the less-funded “have-nots.” Building a model trained by multiple entities is the solution, in his opinion.”It’s not about decentralization per se, but multiple people creating a model with the ownership sitting with multiple stakeholders who trained it.”

A previous pilot Fetch.ai worked with back in 2020 around parking solutions – it used AI to both find free spaces in city parking lots, but also to change prices and reward people with free public transport tickets when they chose not to drive at all – is another.

However, there will also be economic elements to this: the startup plans to build services to take results from applications powered by generative AI and turn them into transactions. For example, asking a chatbot about the best flights from London to Istanbul in the future might not just be a list of flights and prices, but results sorted and personalized to how you prefer to travel. Fetch.ai wants to provide the tools to actually connect these results with the purchase of tickets. And those purchases, Sheikh said, will be made with FET tokens.

Whether companies will have the appetite to be part of this is yet to be seen, but Fetch.ai’s approach is nonetheless important: the idea of ​​building beyond basic “wow” applications will have to be explored sooner or later, and explorations in place is a sign of how the hype can eventually land in the world of real use.

“Fetch.ai’s platform provides a comprehensive solution for building and deploying peer-to-peer applications with automation and AI capabilities,” Andrei Grachev, managing partner of DWF Labs, said in a statement. “Their technical architecture and decentralized approach to machine learning is creating a new paradigm for developers and entrepreneurs, and we are excited to support their growth and development.”