Tagus Capital is a UK FCA regulated digital asset venture capital firm.

Tagus Capital

Lightspeed Faction is a joint venture with Lightspeed Venture Partners, and as a result, combines Faction's crypto-only approach with Lightspeed's deep Silicon Valley roots and platform business scaling resources. Faction collaborates with Lightspeed on blockchain-related matters, but operates the fund independently.

Lightspeed Faction

Digital Currency Group builds and supports bitcoin and blockchain companies by leveraging insights, network, and access to capital. Based in Stamford, Connecticut, DCG has been an active seed investor in the digital currency industry with 150+ investments in over 30 countries. In addition, DCG owns and operates CoinDesk, the top media and events platform in the blockchain space, Genesis Trading, the industry's leading bitcoin brokerage firm, and Grayscale Investments, the largest digital currency asset management firm.

Digital Currency Group

Volt Capital is a digital financial platform. They provide services for market cycles, ecosystems, and networks. Their customers' inquiries are addressed through phone, email, and online applications.

Volt Capital

Inception Capital, formerly OP Crypto, is a first-check VC focusing on early-stage web3 startups. Since raising $50M in September 2021, we have been at the forefront of the industry, investing at the earliest stage in over 30 projects such as Scroll Tech, Merit Circle, Avalanche, Celestia. Backed by esteemed investors like Bill Ackman, Alan Howard, and Garry Tan, and institutions including Galaxy Digital, Animoca Brands, and Mirana, Inception Capital boasts an extensive, global network. This network spans venture funds, exchanges, expert advisors, and major ecosystem founders (Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, Scroll, et cetera), enabling us to source and secure the most competitive deals in the market. Our team, rooted in the United States yet deeply connected to the APAC region, positions Inception Capital as a vital conduit between East and West. This unique positioning allows us to offer our portfolio companies more than just capital. With a dedicated team providing portfolio support, we assist our founders in key areas such as marketing, tokenomics, and strategic networking, ensuring they have the tools and guidance necessary to thrive in an ever-evolving landscape. Discover more about Inception Capital and how we are shaping the future of crypto venture capital: Visit our website: https://www.inception.capital/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_inceptioncap

Inception Capital

OKX Ventures focuses on exploring the best blockchain projects on a global scale, supporting cutting-edge blockchain technology innovation, promoting the healthy development of the global blockchain industry, and investing in long-term structural value. Through its commitment to supporting entrepreneurs who contribute to the development of the blockchain industry, OKX Ventures helps build innovative companies and brings global resources and historical experience to blockchain projects.

OKX Ventures

Protein Capital is an asset manager specialized in digital assets since 2018. They invest in promising blockchain, Web3 and AI companies building products and services that power the Internet of Value. They take on the responsibility of guiding the way in the adoption and evolution of emerging technologies, setting standards of excellence and leading with vision and determination.

Protein Capital

FLock.io

FLock enables decentralised and privacy-preserving machine learning, coordinated by smart contracts We work to make user data collection obsolete, and widespread governance participation guaranteed by code we propose to use distributed ledger technology (DLT) to achieve FLock, a secure and reliable decentralized {F}ederated {L}earning system built on B{lock}chain. Or, in plain words, we build TensorFlow Federated (TFF) for Web 3.0

Based in the UK, FLock.io offers an end-to-end AI co-creation stack that utilizes a blend of federated learning and blockchain technologies. This enables AI models to be trained directly on user devices without the need to relocate sensitive data, thus maintaining privacy and reducing the risk of misuse, while it utilizes blockchain technology to facilitate community involvement and data security in AI model training. In addition, the company offers GPTs that are tailored for Web3 knowledge.&nbsp;

The toolkit to build machine learning applications at scale

Machine Learning Infrastructure

FLock.io Secures Academic Grant from Ethereum Foundation to Advance Blockchain-Driven AI Research

Based in the UK, FLock.io offers an end-to-end AI co-creation stack that utilizes a blend of federated learning and blockchain technologies. This enables AI models to be trained directly on user devices without the need to relocate sensitive data, thus maintaining privacy and reducing the risk of misuse, while it utilizes blockchain technology to facilitate community involvement and data security in AI model training. In addition, the company offers GPTs that are tailored for Web3 knowledge.&nbsp;Key customers and partnershipsIn April 2024, FLock.io announced a partnership with DePIN network IO.Net to enhance its capabilities with decentralized compute power.

Datagen provides a self-service synthetic data platform that generates visual synthetic data of humans for computer vision applications. The platform allows users to write their own code to generate labeled synthetic data for faces, full body, and humans in motion in the form of images and videos to test and train AI models while retaining complete control over the data. The data covers a range of computer vision tasks including face landmark detection, face and hair segmentation, facial recognition and identification, full body pose estimation, full body segmentation, and behavior detection.Key customers and partnershipsThe company serves three of the top five global technology companies and Fortune 500 companies across the automotive, smart fitness, AR/VR/metaverse, smart office, and home security industries. Its notable customers include Google, Toyota, NVIDIA, IBM, and Intel.Funding and financialsIn March 2022, the company raised USD 50 million in a Series B funding round led by Scale Venture Partners. The funds were utilized to bolster its position in the market.Datagen reported to have recorded 8x growth in revenue in 2022.

Datagen

Weights &amp; Biases offers a platform that allows users to build models with experiment tracking, data set and model versioning, data visualization, hyperparameter optimization, and model management. The platform enables users to automatically retrain and re-evaluate models and centrally manage all model versions through every lifecycle stage—from development to staging to production. It also helps to visualize comparisons between model versions to evaluate performance and identify regressions before model deployment. It also offers toolkits such as <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19172">W&amp;B Weave and W&amp;B Production Monitoring </a>to build and monitor data- and ML-powered applications, respectively, through interactive visualizations.The company also offers a <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17880">suite of tools (W&amp;B Prompts) </a>to support large language model operations (LLMOps). W&amp;B Prompts includes tools and features for experiment tracking, debugging, and collaboration, as well as a one-click method to evaluate and score prompts through the OpenAI Eval’s framework.The company provides the platform through a free tier and under a subscription model for up to USD 50 per user per month.Key customers and partnershipsWeights &amp; Biases served more than 700,000 ML practitioners as of August 2023. Its notable include NVIDIA, Toyota, BMW Group, Samsung, Fujifilm, Truebill, and Clear Capital.The company has <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/18663">partnered with Lambda </a>, a GPU cloud computing provider, to offer its MLOps platform integrated with the infrastructure services of the latter, catering to enterprises dealing with AI and deep-learning workloads.Funding and financialsIn August 2023, the company raised <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/20874">USD 50 million in a strategic investment </a>round at a valuation of USD 1.25 billion, led by Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman. The round also saw participation from Sapphire Ventures, Coatue, Insight Partners, and other investors. The company aimed to utilize the fresh funds to further develop its ML tools, including the launch of W&amp;B Prompts.

Weights & Biases

BentoML offers an open-source platform called Bento Cloud, for the deployment and scaling of AI applications. It is a fully managed platform that handles the complexities of AI infrastructure, providing serverless autoscaling as required during the development and production stages. The platform helps to ship models to production with advanced deployment options including online and shadow A/B testing, while also providing visibility through model performance monitoring. The platform integrates with an organization’s existing data stack and enables users to continuously deploy and improve models in production. The company offers its platform through a combination of subscription and usage-based model.In addition, BentoML also provides the following open-source platforms: 1) Yatai, for model deployment on Kubernetes and 2) bentoctl, for model deployment on any cloud platform.Key customers and partnershipsAs of January 2024, BentoML reported that over 1,000 organizations, comprising more than 3,000 members, use its platform. Its notable customers include Koo, Open Layer, Line, and Naver.The company entered into a strategic partnership with TomTom, a developer of location technology, to help integrate with various models as well as in LLM deployments.Funding and financialsThe company raised <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19684">USD 9 million in seed funding </a>in June 2023 led by DCM Ventures, with participation from Bow Capital. It aimed to channel the newly acquired funds to enhance its platform and offer developers a range of tools for building, deploying, and scaling AI applications efficiently.

BentoML

Iguazio provides a serverless platform based on its open-source Nuclio framework that helps users to develop, deploy, and manage real-time AI applications without requiring them to manually manage underlying infrastructures such as servers and storage. The platform creates real-time intelligence for applications located at the edge, public cloud, and on-premise data centers and reduces bandwidth constraints by consolidating data into a repository and making it available for applications as required. The platform can ingest and transform data from any source, which is then used to train, evaluate, deploy, and monitor models in production.The company leverages Big Data and ML software such as Apache Spark, TensorFlow, and Kubernetes to manage software containers that enable applications to run across different computing environments.Key customers and partnershipsIguazio serves customers in the financial services, telecommunications, smart mobility, manufacturing, retail, AdTech, gaming, healthcare, energy, and utilities sectors. Notable customers include Samsung, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AWS, Google, and Intel.Funding and financialsIn January 2020, the company raised USD 24 million in a funding round led by INCapital Ventures. The funds were utilized to accelerate its growth, expand its reach into new global markets, grow sales, and facilitate new sales channels that include companies such as Dell Technologies

Iguazio

Cogito Tech provides image and video annotation to generate computer vision training data sets for ML &amp; deep learning (DL). The video annotation solution leverages AI-powered tools to convert video into a sequence of images and generates training data sets for ML-based AI models, including self-driving cars and drones. The AI model understands and derives insights from visual data to detect, identify, classify, and track objects in an image or video. Cogito also provides virtual assistants and chatbots to help users in the process of training ML algorithms. Cogito Tech also provides high-quality, ethically sourced datasets that are compliant and reliable to train ML models.In addition, the company provides services to fine-tune LLMs and GenAI applications through reinforcement learning techniques as well as stress test models through red teaming.Key customers and partnershipsAs of December 2022, the company served more than 150 customers across 25 countries in the retail, medical, automotive, agriculture, robotics, smart cities, security, and manufacturing industries. Notable customers includes Verizon Media, The University of Sydney, National Geographic, Tumblr, and Vimeo.

Cogito Tech

Platforms and frameworks that help developers build and train ML models.

Platforms that deploy and host the trained and tested models in production and integrate them into applications through APIs.

Platforms that generate artificial data that mimics the characteristics of real data, which is then used to train ML models at scale.

Platforms that help monitor and manage ML models in training and deployment to track performance, conduct variance analysis, and optimize performance.

Makers of hardware such as CPUs, GPUs, and other application-specific hardware required to train and run ML workloads.

Integrated solutions that handle the end-to-end processes of developing, training, deploying, and monitoring ML models.

Data exchange providers and platforms that offer data labeling services via manual and/or software methods, which are used as input to train ML models.

Includes companies that provide infrastructure to build AI/ML applications

Provides tools to build, monitor, and deploy GenAI applications

Industry is focused on offering platforms for other businesses to build AI-/ML-powered apps

ANALYST_QUICK_TAKE

<div>
 FLock.io has been awarded an academic grant by the Ethereum Foundation through its Academic Grants Round 2024. The grant is targeted towards funding research in the encouraging strategies for blockchain solutions enabled by smart contracts. The focus is to optimize tokenomics incentives mechanisms that discourage harmful behavior in the lifecycle of decentralized AI development.
 Additionally, FLock.io announced the ongoing closed beta of its AI Arena where developers are competing to develop superior AI models, verified on a single validation dataset, and ranked on a leaderboard similar to Kaggle.
</div> Analyst QuickTake : 
 This latest funding follows the company's recently closed <a href="https: 
//sp-edge.com/updates/27988"> USD 6 million, </a> indicating a seed round toward further developing the world-first collaborative, decentralized AI training platform with on-chain governance leveraging federal learning technologies. The additional funding indicates a growing interest in developing novel approaches to creating safer and more secure AI development.

FLock.io

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