AI Data Collection Startup Sapien Raises $10.5M Seed Funding Led by Variant

The Sapien team is led by Rowan Stone, the former co-creator of Coinbase’s layer 2 network Base, and Trevor Koverko, founder of Polymath and author of RWA standard ERC1400.

As well as incentivizing work with USDC or reward points, AI works post collateral and like a proof-of-stake blockchain, that earned or paid for collateral can be slashed for cheating or using bots.

Sapien, a startup that incentivizes people to supply all sorts of data for use in AI, has raised $10.5 million in seed funding led by VC firm Variant, with participation from Primitive Ventures, Animoca, Yield Game Guild and HF0.

The Sapien team, led by Rowan Stone, the former co-creator of Coinbase’s layer 2 network Base, and Trevor Koverko, founder of Polymath and author of RWA standard ERC1400, are incentivizing a growing army of data providers – which can be anything from people labeling everyday items or traffic signs with a mobile device, to pinpointing particular types of cancer cells – with either USDC stablecoin or a system of reward points.

AI is often framed in terms of some insidious dystopian creep that will gradually take over our lives, but there less talked about flipside is the way it can provide entirely new forms of work, in this case a global pool of decentralized AI workers.

“The big unlock that OpenAI found was that in order to help AI be smarter and get closer to human level reasoning is to throw industrial scale human labor at the problem,” said Sapien CEO Rowan Stone in an interview. “And so literally, just have lots and lots of people provide their knowledge or their input in order to make the models smarter.”

Sapien is currently working to solve>proof-of-stake, minus the back of house consensus,” Stone said. “If workers do good work, then they are paid extra because they’re valuable to us. If they do bad work, or they cheat, or they use bots, or there’s some type of foul play, then we have a method to claw back some of that collateral.”

Angel investors such as YGG founder Gabby Dizon and Softbank Vision Fund alum Kevin Jiang were also included in the seed funding.

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