Framework Ventures leads $9 million seed round for web3-powered AI project Perle

Web3-powered AI project Perle has raised an additional $9 million in a seed round led by Framework Ventures. This brings the startup’s funding to a total of $17.5 million as it looks to build a product that “rewards users for reviewing and contributing accurate data sets to AI systems.”

With the fresh injection of capital, Perle will launch Perle Labs, a product using blockchain rails and incentives for user payments and onchain attributions in an attempt to improve how AI models are trained. Perle offers "curated" data and human reviewers, according to its website.

“As AI models grow more sophisticated, their success hinges on how well they handle the long tail of data inputs — those rare, ambiguous, or context-specific scenarios,” said Ahmed Rashad, CEO of Perle and former Scale AI employee. “By decentralizing this process, we can unlock global participation, reduce bias, and dramatically improve model performance.”

The product is based on the idea that the progress in AI “will be driven more by better data than by simply scaling models,” Framework co-founder Vance Spencer said in a statement. 

"LLMs aren't failing because they run out of room to think—they're failing because they don't know how to think when abstraction breaks their training patterns," Perle wrote in a recent paper. "Instead of asking LLMs to magically reason through complexity, we need to feed all AI systems better, more structured inputs."

Although companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI have released powerful closed-source text and image generation models, it is sometimes unclear for casual users to judge the quality of the input data — a process Perle thinks can be improved through “high-quality human feedback.”

The startup will offer a “self-serve platform” for the full AI development lifecycle — from multimodal audio, image, and text data collection to model fine-tuning, according to the announcement.

Perle previously raised an $8.5 million pre-seed round in October 2024 led by CoinFund.