Decentralized Data Infrastructure on Story Protocol Funded with $15M Seed Capital by Poseidon
Poseidon, a groundbreaking decentralized AI data layer, has secured $15 million in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and A16z. The startup, which was incubated by Story Protocol - another A16z crypto portfolio company - aims to create a sustainable and compliant AI data ecosystem.
Poseidon leverages the Story Protocol blockchain to provide AI developers with IP-safe, legally cleared training data. This is made possible through Story's programmable IP layer and immutable IP registry. The startup's primary goal is to overcome bottlenecks in AI training data availability, legality, and diversity, powering the next generation of AI that interacts effectively with the physical world.
Sandeep Chinchali, Poseidon co-founder and chief AI officer at Story, stated, "Our decentralized data layer aims to establish a new economic foundation for the internet, rewarding creators and suppliers for providing diverse inputs needed by next-generation intelligent systems."
Poseidon's decentralized data layer addresses the critical challenge of sourcing and managing high-quality AI training data. It achieves this by enabling decentralized, traceable, and monetizable access to AI training data through blockchain-based smart contracts. This ensures fair compensation to data creators and protects intellectual property rights.
Moreover, Poseidon addresses the shortage and ethical/legal complications of AI training data, particularly real-world, diverse, and multi-sensory datasets essential for applications like robotics, autonomous vehicles, and wearables. The platform coordinates supply and demand for AI data in a distributed manner, globally crowdsourcing data using smartphone SDKs and specialized apps, ensuring regional and situational diversity that centralized datasets lack.
The platform implements a full-stack data pipeline, covering data collection, cleaning, validation, IP registration, traceability, and incentive mechanisms. Contributors, annotators, and synthetic data creators receive royalties automatically via smart contracts. Each dataset used by Poseidon is validated using metadata checks and Story's programmable IP licensing to guarantee provenance and compliance with copyright laws.
Poseidon's data collection prioritizes targeted data collection based on real-world failure modes. This is particularly important in addressing the issue of AI foundation models exhausting easily accessible training data. The startup has already partnered with an unnamed top robotics firm and an audio foundation model team sourcing dialect-rich speech data.
In addition, Poseidon is partnering with universities and Fortune 500 companies to build AI capabilities. A16z Crypto founder Chris Dixon stated that Poseidon's decentralized data layer aims to "transform data into legally enforceable and economically incentivized assets, thus reducing copyright risks that have impeded previous AI projects."
As generative AI threatens intellectual property rights, Poseidon's decentralized data layer provides a solution that ensures compliance and fair compensation for data creators. The platform's innovative approach to AI training data promises to power the next generation of AI that interacts with the physical world effectively.
The decentralized data layer developed by Poseidon, leveraging technology and artificial-intelligence, aims to revolutionize AI training data by offering IP-safe, legally cleared datasets, thereby powering the next generation of AI that interacts effectively with the physical world. Poseidon's approach addresses the shortage and ethical/legal complications of AI training data, particularly real-world, diverse, and multi-sensory datasets, which are crucial for applications such as robotics, autonomous vehicles, and wearables.
