Grass, the Solana DePIN project, is raising $10 million in a bridge raise, Blockworks has exclusively learned.
The project previously raised both a seed and a Series A round.
The decentralized AI project which allows folks to sell access to idle internet bandwidth — essentially giving you more power to hand over your data rather than having a large company scrape it for profit.
Polychain and Tribe Capital participated in the bridge round, which is primarily a token purchase, Grass’s Andrej Radonjic told Blockworks.
“Grass is a piece of technology that allows companies to access data at an unprecedented scale,” Radonjic said when asked why Grass was interested in a token purchase.
“The possibilities are kind of endless in terms of the directions that you’re able to go. And there are multiple things that we think are vital to build on top of this, namely live context retrieval.”
He further explained that, at this moment, the way AI companies are training their models is to scrape search engines such as Google. However, they can’t deploy internet-scale web crawls because they’re being blocked, but Grass offers a solution.
Grass wasn’t necessarily actively looking to raise at the moment, Radonjic said, but it happened at the right time for the team.
“I was mentioning that commercially, things are going really well, and…we’re seeing amazing growth in terms of selling training data to AI companies that are looking to train things like video models and text to speech models,” he said.
“But I had mentioned that one of the things that we’re looking forward to over the next year to two years…[is actually] having Grass become infrastructure for not just training data, but also inference data.”
There’ll be a shift from compute cycles on training to inference, and the Grass team wants to get ahead of it. The end goal will be to do an “inner scale web crawl,” which would allow them to build out the live context retrieval.
“Rarely have we come across a team executing as ferociously as the Grass team does. They are an archetypical example of how businesses built on distributed systems can outcompete web2 peers,” Polychain’s Josh Rosenthal told Blockworks in a statement.
“After leading their Seed round, participating in their Series A, and now leading this round, this is the third time Polychain Capital has backed Grass…We’re thrilled to triple down on Grass at such a meaningful inflection point of their journey as a leading data and AI business.”
In a cycle that’s hyper-focused on crypto use cases, Grass is offering a more crypto native use case than, say, stablecoins. But it’s also operating in a space — AI — that’s just as lucrative as it is competitive.
“Since we invested in 2023, Grass has served as a benchmark for how we want our portfolio companies to operate — a diabolical focus on product and revenue,” Boris Revsin, CEO and Managing Director of Tribe Capital, told Blockworks.
“Grass is a product leader and we have seen major 7-figure clients, including the largest AI labs, sign up in the last 12 months. That’s what matters. Everything else follows.”
In the last 30 days, Grass has had 8.5 million monthly active users and is currently working with around 20 companies, as well as with nonprofits and universities.
The structuring of the round was never really “a question,” Radonjic explained.
“The Grass Foundation…faces all of our customers contractually. And all the revenue that these customers are paying is going straight into the Grass Foundation’s bank account…The GRASS token is the primary vehicle for value accrual for everything that we’re doing.”
This is a developing story.
This article was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by editor Jeffrey Albus before publication.
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Source: https://blockworks.co/news/depin-grass-raise-polychain-tribe
