Ritual, a startup dedicated to establishing a decentralized platform for artificial intelligence (AI), has secured $25 million in a seed funding round, led by Archetype, with participation from Robot Ventures and Canonical. Based in San Francisco, Ritual's mission is to democratize access to AI technology, challenging the prevailing concentration of innovation within major tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Meta. The startup envisions an open, decentralized network that facilitates hosting, training, and running AI models.

Niraj Pant, co-founder of Ritual, expressed concerns about the consolidation of AI within a small group of powerful companies, stating, "We founded Ritual to end the ecosystem’s reliance on the few, to open access to this critical infrastructure, and ensure a future of building better AI." Ritual's network connects distributed computing devices, enabling anyone to participate in training and running AI models, not just tech giants with substantial computing resources. The platform's API layer ensures easy access to models, and a proof system guarantees computational integrity. The decentralized nature of Ritual ensures resistance to censorship, along with inherent data privacy and verifiability.

Ash Egan, founder of Archetype, sees Ritual as building the leading decentralized AI network, expanding possibilities for innovation across various industries, from crypto to enterprise.

Ritual's unique approach enables use cases such as autonomous agents and integrating AI with decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols for dynamic governance. It claims to be the first platform allowing smart contracts to natively integrate AI capabilities, and enterprises can leverage the network for private fine-tuning and inference with foundation models.

Founded by former Polychain Capital investor Niraj Pant and machine learning researcher turned Palantir quant Akilesh Potti, Ritual boasts a 15-person team featuring experts from OpenAI, Coinbase, Palantir, and other leading tech companies. The startup plans to utilize the funding to expand the network, hire key positions, and grow its user ecosystem, targeting an alpha launch in early 2024. Advisors include AI and crypto experts Illia Polosukhin, Sreeram Kannan, and Tarun Chitra.

"Illia Polosukhin believes Ritual is building long-term infrastructure for safe and secure open-source AI innovation across all industries, with the potential to power the next wave of growth and innovation," noted the advisors.