Crypto Venture Funds Variant, 1kx Lead $6M Funding Round for ZK-Meets-AI Startup Modulus
The funding will be used for the company’s ambitions in zero-knowledge machine learning, combining aspects of zero-knowledge cryptography with artificial intelligence or AI.
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Modulus Labs, the company behind a new specialized zero-knowledge prover for AI models, announced Wednesday that it is launching and has raised $6M in a seed round.
The round was led by Variant and 1kx, and includes participation from Inflection, Bankless, Blockchain Builders Fund and others. Angel investors include names in the blockchain ecosystem like the Ethereum Foundation, Worldcoin, Polygon, Celestia and Solana, according to Modulus.
Modulus makes use of ZKML - an acronym for zero-knowledge machine learning - and combines ZK proofs for AI models. The point of it is to use zero knowledge proofs to prove that an AI model was executed correctly.
The funding will go to helping build the Modulus product, co-founder Daniel Shorr told CoinDesk.
“Our audience is basically smart contract devs or on-chain services who want to add AI,” Shorr said. “But up until now anyways, to add AI into your smart contract, means throwing away this whole blockchain security.”
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Margaux Nijkerk reports on the Ethereum protocol and L2s. A graduate of Johns Hopkins and Emory universities, she has a masters in International Affairs & Economics. She holds a small amount of ETH and other altcoins.