Ritual, a San Francisco-based startup, has recently secured $25 million in a seed funding round led by venture capital firm Archetype. Other participants in the funding include Robot Ventures and Canonical. The startup’s mission is to democratize access to artificial intelligence (AI) technology by creating a decentralized platform.
Currently, the AI landscape is dominated by big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, limiting innovation and access to high-quality AI models. Ritual aims to change this by building an open network that hosts, trains, and runs AI models. The company believes that the concentration of AI power among a small group of companies poses a significant threat to the future of technology.