Tokyo, Japan, March 27th, 2024, Chainwire
Funds from the Pre-Series A round led by Dragonfly will further develop MyShell’s open-source models and agent platform for empowering AI creators
MyShell, a decentralized AI consumer layer, announced today that it has raised US$11 million in a Pre-Series A round, with participation from a cohort of high-profile investors, including Dragonfly, Delphi Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Maven11 Capital, Nascent, Nomad Capital, OKX Ventures, etc.
Prominent angel investors, such as former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, NEAR Protocol Co-Founder Illia Polosukhin, former Paradigm Investment Partner Casey K. Caruso, and ex-Parafi partner Santiago R. Santos also joined the round, which brought MyShell’s total amount raised to date to $16.6 million.
“MyShell is poised to revolutionize the AI creator ecosystem,” MyShell CEO Ethan Sun said. “With this new funding, we’re not just scaling our operations, we’re catalyzing a movement towards a more open, collaborative, and democratic AI landscape.”
MyShell, an AI consumer layer that empowers users to build, share, and own AI agents, is home to over 1 million registered users and 50,000 creators. The company plans to use the new funding to add resources to develop its open-source foundational model; empower AI creators; AI assets trading platform; and further support the open-source community.
In contrast to most dominant AI companies such as OpenAI, MyShell is committed to decentralization and open-source development. This focus has already facilitated the growth of several successful projects on the platform, including OpenVoice, which has earned over 15,000 stars on Github; MeloTTS, a pioneering open-source text-to-speech solution that closely mimics the human voice and supports a wide range of languages and accents; and Allice, the open-source agent framework for complicated AI development workflow.
“The demand for personalized AI experiences has grown explosively in the last year, but right now, most of those experiences are centralized with gatekeepers,” said Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi.
“MyShell uses crypto and decentralization to put the power over the AI ecosystem back into the hands of users and allows open-source creators and communities to work together to create magical experiences and capture the fruits of their labor….