AI platform Ritual has recently announced a successful Series A funding round, raising $25 million. The funding was led by Archetype, with support from Accomplice and Robot Ventures. The company plans to use the funds to grow its team, expand its developer network, and seed its network infrastructure.
Focus Areas for Expansion
Ritual has outlined five primary focus areas for expansion in its announcement:
- Incentivized Network: Ritual aims to establish a network that links distributed computing devices for AI model hosting, sharing, inference, and refinement.
- API Development: The company will develop an API layer to facilitate model access.
- Proof Layer: Ritual plans to implement a proof layer to ensure computational integrity.
- Censorship Resistance: Emphasizing the importance of censorship resistance, Ritual aims to provide a platform that is resilient against censorship efforts.
- Enhancing Privacy: Privacy is a key concern for Ritual, and the company plans to enhance privacy features in its AI platform.
Ritual’s goal is to provide open access to the underlying infrastructure that powers AI innovation in the web3 space. The company envisions evolving its first product, Infernet, into a modular suite of execution layers that can interoperate with other base layer infrastructure. This would enable every protocol and application on any chain to leverage Ritual as an AI Coprocessor.
“The grand vision for Ritual is to become the schelling point of AI in the web3 space by evolving Infernet into a modular suite of execution layers that interop with other base layer infrastructure in the ecosystem, allowing every protocol and application on any chain to use Ritual as a AI Coprocessor,” said Ritual in their announcement.
Ritual also highlighted the current limitations in access to chips, computing capabilities, and AI models, which are largely controlled by a few companies. The lack of appropriate infrastructure to reward companies for their contributions often discourages them from making their models open-source. Additionally, users have little influence over the governance and ownership of AI technologies.
“The consolidation of AI among a small group of powerful companies poses a significant threat to the future of technology,” said Ritual co-founder Niraj Pant. “We founded Ritual to end the ecosystem’s reliance on the few, to open access to this critical infrastructure, and ensure a future of building better AI. Ritual is the decentralized network that the ecosystem needs.”
Ritual’s co-founders, Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti, bring a wealth of experience to the company. Pant, an experienced Web3 investor, has previously invested in companies such as EigenLayer and Solana. Potti, on the other hand, is a machine learning researcher turned quant builder at Palantir.
Ritual plans to launch its alpha platform early next year, although the company has not disclosed its valuation for this funding round.
