Crypto-AI startup Sahara Labs raises $37 million in strategic funding

Sahara Labs, a crypto-AI startup building the decentralized blockchain platform Sahara AI, has raised $37 million in a strategic funding round co-led by Pantera Capital and Polychain Capital.

Other investors in the round included Binance Labs, Samsung Next, Matrix Partners, Nomad Capital, SCB 10X, Canonical Capital, Mirana Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Dispersion Capital and Tangent Ventures, Sahara Labs said Wednesday.

This strategic funding round comes five months after Sahara Labs raised $6 million in a seed funding round, bringing its total funding to $43 million. Sean Ren, co-founder and CEO of Sahara, declined to comment on the structure of the round, the startup's valuation or whether any of the investors have taken a board seat, either advisory or directorial.

Ren, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, co-founded Sahara Labs last year with Tyler Zhou, a former investment director at Binance Labs. The duo is building Sahara AI with a vision "where AI is open, equitable and beneficial to everyone across all stages of the AI development cycle," Ren said.

What is Sahara AI?

Sahara AI is a decentralized blockchain platform that aims to enable everyone — from individual developers to large enterprises — to participate in and benefit from AI advancements, Ren said. Today, major tech companies dominate the AI landscape by gathering vast amounts of public data from individuals, often without clear compensation or transparency, he added. This concentration of power and lack of openness can lead to biased algorithms, privacy issues and unequal access to the benefits of AI, according to Ren.

With Sahara AI, Ren aims to ensure that "all contributors are fairly compensated, sovereignty of data and models is maintained and AI assets can be securely created, shared and traded, all while preserving privacy and promoting inclusivity."

The Sahara AI platform will include Sahara blockchain, an AI-native blockchain for AI-related transactions and lifecycle management, Ren said. He added that the platform will also offer an AI infrastructure for decentralized training, a marketplace for AI assets like models and datasets, and development tools for both technical and non-technical users. The platform will also feature "encrypted vaults" for protecting AI assets and user data. All these elements combined will support collaborative AI development and deployment, according to Ren.

As for Sahara AI's use cases, Ren said the platform has partnered with one of the largest creator agencies in West Hollywood to help them build and deploy "personal replicas" for automating the creators' fan engagement activities. "Sahara AI's agent solution analyzes historical data stored securely on the creators' local devices to create authentic conversational output, including multi-modal information, to match the unique style of each creator," Ren said.

He also cited another use case involving Motherson Group, one of the world's leading auto component makers. Ren noted that Motherson Group's clients use Sahara AI's privacy-preserving AI agent solution to create AI assistants for their 3D computer-aided designers, HR operation specialists, and marketing teams. "These specialized agents are built upon Sahara AI's decentralized Low-Rank Adaptation of LLM models (LoRA) framework, which allows Motherson's proprietary data to remain local when agents are deployed and continuously updated," Ren said.

Motherson Group's vice chairman Laksh Vaaman Sehgal, along with other notable figures including Anthropic research scientist Rohan Taori and Together AI CEO Vipul Prakash, are among the advisors to Sahara AI, the firm said.

Sahara blockchain launch schedule

When asked about the tech stack Sahara is using for its blockchain, Ren said that information will be disclosed in its litepaper when it is launched in the near future. The testnet and mainnet launch schedules of the Sahara blockchain will also be announced in the coming months, he added.

When asked if Sahara will also launch its own token alongside the mainnet to reward contributors, Ren declined to comment.

There are currently over 60 people working for Sahara Labs, and Ren is looking to hire more across various roles, including AI researchers, engineers and marketing and business development professionals.

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