On March 25, 0G Labs, a web3 modular infrastructure company, announced the successful completion of a $35 million pre-seed funding round. The funding round attracted participation from over 40 crypto-native institutions, including Hack VC and Blockchain Builders Fund, according to a press release from 0G Labs.
The primary goal of the funding is to materialize 0G Labs' vision of creating a comprehensive blockchain-based solution for training, deploying, and operating artificial intelligence models. The company highlights one of the key advantages of its platform as its speed, surpassing current state-of-the-art solutions like Ethereum's smart contract network.
Ed Roman, managing partner of Hack V, commended 0G Labs as a trailblazer in on-chain generative AI infrastructure. He emphasized the company's data availability technology, which has demonstrated speeds over 1000 times faster than ETH L1 at a lower cost. Roman expressed pride in partnering with 0G Labs and anticipated the flourishing of their ecosystem as they progress towards mainnet.
Pre-seed funding typically marks the initial round of funding for a startup. 0G Labs' achievement of securing $35 million in emerging funding represents one of the largest initial investments for a company operating at the intersection of Web3 and artificial intelligence (AI).
For comparison, OpenAI, the entity responsible for ChatGPT and Dall-E, raised $120,000 in pre-seed funding back on August 22, 2016. Since then, OpenAI has leveraged its generative AI technology's success, achieving a valuation of approximately $80 billion as of February 2024. Among the products under development by 0G Labs is "Uni-Chain," as stated on their website. This architecture aims to seamlessly connect networks into a unified metaverse, facilitating transactions and interactions across chains through a single wallet access point.
The website elaborates that their modular technology will promote frictionless interoperability between chains while prioritizing security, eliminating fragmentation, and maximizing connectivity. This vision aims to create a weightless and open metaverse, enabling users to engage with services and other users on any chain effortlessly.
