Ritual, a startup building a decentralized AI platform, has raised $25 million in a seed funding round. The funding was led by venture capital firm Archetype, with participation from Robot Ventures and Canonical.
The San Francisco-based startup seeks to provide global access to artificial intelligence technology. Currently, innovation and access to high-quality AI, such as large language models, is concentrated in large technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta. Ritual wants to change that by building an open, decentralized network to host, train, and run AI models.
“The consolidation of AI among a small group of powerful companies poses a major threat to the future of technology,” Neeraj Pant, co-founder of Ritual, said in a press release. “We founded Ritual to end the ecosystem’s dependence on a few people, open access to this critical infrastructure, and ensure a better AI future.”
Democratizing access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence
The Ritual Network connects distributed computing devices to run diverse AI workloads, allowing anyone to participate in training and running models, not just big tech companies with vast computing resources.
The API layer provides easy access to models hosted on the network. The testing system provides guarantees about computational integrity. Ritual’s decentralized nature also makes it censorship-resistant and provides data privacy and verifiability.
“Ritual is building the leading decentralized AI network, expanding the potential for every company, from crypto to enterprise, to innovate in this new frontier of technology,” said Ash Egan, founder of Archetype.
Unique use cases enabled by Ritual’s decentralized approach include autonomous agents and AI integration with decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols to enable dynamic governance.
The startup claims to be the first platform that allows smart contracts to integrate AI capabilities natively. Companies can also leverage the network to make ad hoc adjustments and inferences using underlying models.
A strong team to make the vision a reality
Ritual was founded by Pant, a former investor at Polychain Capital, and Akhilesh Butte, a machine learning researcher turned quantitative analyst at Palantir.
The 15-person team includes experts from OpenAI, Coinbase, Palantir and other leading technology companies.
Ritual plans to use the new funds to build out the network, hire key roles, and grow the user ecosystem. The company aims to launch Alpha in early 2024.
Advisors include AI and cryptocurrency experts such as NEAR Protocol co-founder Ilya Polosukhin, EigenLayer founder Sriram Kannan, and Robot Ventures GP Tarun Chitra.
“Ritual is building a long-term infrastructure for secure, open source AI innovation across industries, and has the potential to drive the next wave of growth and innovation,” Polosukhin said.