Funding Roundup: HackVC leads funding round for DePIN Grass

Grass, a DePIN focused on verifying internet data, raised a Series A, the team exclusively told Blockworks. 

HackVC led the round, with participation from Polychain, Delphi, Lattice and Brevan Howard. The team declined to disclose the amount raised but confirmed it raised $3.5 million in an earlier seed round.

Wynd Labs CEO Andrej Radonjic sat down with Blockworks to talk about the raise and the project he founded alongside two other co-founders. 

Radonjic said the Grass project was a concept in mid-2022, but they didn’t start building until the beginning of 2023. The pre-seed round raise actually happened right after the collapse of FTX, he noted. 

Read more: Wynd Network raises $3.5M from Polychain, Tribe and more for decentralized AI project

To put it simply, Grass enables data scraping using millions of nodes.

“It’s a piece of infrastructure that effectively allows any company or LLM to turn the entirety of the internet into an API call. So if you’re an LLM or any model and you need data in real time, plug it into Grass, and…it’ll have online capabilities. You won’t have the issue of asking your model what happened this morning, and it says ‘I was only trained up until October’, or something like that,” Radonjic said.

As AI becomes more lucrative — with a report from Bloomberg earlier this month setting OpenAI’s valuation to $150 billion — the team’s faced a question from people: “Why is Grass comfortable with open-sourcing such valuable data?”

“The very obvious answer, other than giving back to the open source community, is the fact that where we see 99% of the network’s value accruing is really in live-context retrieval. So the capability of grabbing something from the information in real time,” Radonjic explained.  

Read more: DePIN: A recipe for public goods on public goods

“Five years from now, language models will probably be just as good as they’ll ever get at language reasoning. They’ll get better at other types of reasoning. But when it comes to language, they won’t really need that much more training data and all these static training data sets, they’ll depreciate in value.”

But Radonjic believes one thing that won’t change in the next decade “is the fact that new information will always appear on the internet, and these AI models will always need new information to generate useful insights, and that’s something that Grass is actually specialized in .”

He told Blockworks that the team also found that Grass was something that venture capitalists “hadn’t seen before” when holding conversations around each funding round.

“When we first started raising capital from venture funds, it was actually very difficult for us because we were building something that just did not exist yet. And whenever you do that, you’re always faced with tons of friction because it’s a lot easier to understand yet another blockchain infrastructure play,” he told Blockworks. “That being said though, one thing we did notice from a lot of venture funds is that they want exposure to data protocols…and we were incredibly lucky to get such strong support from our early backers.”

But since then, Grass has grown to more than “two million daily active users,” per Radonjic, and has half a million people in its Discord. It also has a large social media presence, boasting roughly 400,000 followers on X. But the team’s goal is lofty: They’re looking to expand to 100 million users.

“We do feel that once the network becomes decentralized, a lot of folks from other channels — specifically in Web2 — will become a lot more interested in this product, because it will have a certain level of validation,” Radonjic said.

Other notable rounds:

• CertiK’s new venture arm, CertiK Ventures, announced on Thursday a $45 million investment plan to support Web3 projects.
• Bitcoin and ethereum crossover network Hemi Labs raised $15 million in a seed round led by Binance Labs, Breyer Capital and Big Brain Holdings.
• Yellow Network, a DeFi protocol, raised $10 million in a round led by Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, with other participants including Consensys and GSR. 
• Rise Chain, which says it’s “ethereum’s broadband moment,” announced it raised $3.2 million in a seed round led by Finality Venture Capital, with participation from Polygon Ventures and Etherfi.
• Tether said it invested $1.5 million in Sorted Wallet.

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