Solana’s AI Protocol io.net Bags $30M Funding to Build Decentralized GPUs

IO Research, developer of the Solana-based decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) io.net has successfully secured $30 million in a Series A funding round.

Solana io.net Valuation Jumps to $1B

The news of the generated funds which played a crucial role in pushing the valuation of its fully diluted token to $1 billion, was announced on Tuesday. 

Precisely, the funding round was spearheaded by Hack VC in collaboration with several angel investors including Multicoin Capital, 6th Man Ventures, Solana Ventures, OKX Ventures, Aptos Labs, Delphi Digital, The Sandbox, Sebastian Borget of The Sandbox, and others.

According to sources familiar with the Series A funding, the funds were raised in tranches coupled with the fact that it is structured as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE), with token warrants in a 1:1 ratio. The first tranche happened in January but it was not until recently that the final one was completed.

The CEO and founder of io.net Ahmad Shadid, explained the terms of the investment, stating that investors have a minimum one-year lock-in period for tokens.

Shayon Sengupta, an investor partner from Multicoin Capital who corroborated the news of the investment, highlighted the foundation of his relationship with io.net. He stated that Shadid was his first contact person, citing that he was drawn to his singular focus on democratizing access to compute resources for ML workloads. 

More Firms Entering the AI Foundry Space

This $30 million fund will help the Artificial Intelligence (AI) protocol enhance the aggregation of distributed GPUs, especially during this time when there seems to be a general computer shortage amidst a growing demand. Many other AI-based firms like NVIDIA are stepping up their game to meet up with the surge in demand.

In mid-January, NVIDIA grabbed the attention of the AI market as Chinese military entities, state-owned artificial intelligence research centers, and universities began to actively purchase batches of the firm’s semiconductors. These include A100 and the more powerful H100 chips, which had previously been banned from export to China and Hong Kong in 2021.

Sam Altman’s OpenAI is equally trailing this path as it is now searching for funding to build high-performance chips. Part of OpenAI’s plan is to build multiple chip foundries all in a bid to gain investors’ interest.

For NVIDIA, this new path is contributing to growing its dominance in the AI sector. One of its recent projects is to design a new AI chip peculiar to the Chinese market.