Hyperbolic, the leading provider of open access AI computing and inference services, has raised a $12M Series A led by Variant and Polychain Capital, two leading blockchain-focused venture capital firms. This latest raise brings the company’s total funding to $20M.
With this strategic funding, Hyperbolic aims to expand its engineering, go-to-market, and strategic teams. Additionally, Hyperbolic plans to launch its own blockchain in 2025, furthering its vision of the future of AI being collectively governed.
“Hyperbolic is the first player we’ve encountered that truly addresses the ‘cost of trust’ issue in decentralized GPU networks, without sacrificing performance, quality, and user experience,” said Jesse Walden, managing partner at Variant. “With Jasper and Yuchen’s deep expertise spanning both crypto and AI, they are uniquely equipped to transform decentralized compute marketplaces for AI models.”
Following lead investors Variant and Polychain Capital, other notable backers in this funding round include Chapter One, Lightspeed Faction, Bankless Ventures, IOSG, Vertex, GSR, Wintermute Ventures, Blockchain Builders Fund, Alumni Ventures, and Ambush. This follows a $7 million seed round led by Polychain Capital and Lightspeed Faction, which came after a $725,000 pre-seed round with participation from investors such as Chapter One and Samsung Next. Angel investors in this round include Sreeram Kannan (EigenLayer), Devin Walsh (Uniswap Foundation), Ethan Sun (MyShell), Daniel Shorr (Modulus), Bidhan Roy (Bagel), Ying Sheng and Lianmin Zheng (LMSYS), Dillon Rolnick (Nous Research), Alex Atallah and Louis Vichy (OpenRouter), Chainyoda, Comfy Capital, Nicola Greco (Protocol Labs), Alex Atallah (OpenRouter) and Thomas Sco (formerly Worldcoin).
Built on a strong Web2 foundation, Hyperbolic is trusted by major AI players like Quora, Hugging Face, OpenRouter, Black Forest Labs, Nous Research, LMSYS, and leading universities such as Cornell, UC Berkeley, NYU, and Stanford—giving it a significant edge over crypto-first competitors. Now expanding into Web3, Hyperbolic bridges the two worlds because the future of AI is about collaboration. Unlike many Web3 AI projects that falter, Hyperbolic delivers with its GPU Marketplace, Inference Services, and Proof of Sampling (PoSP) —the gold-standard verification protocol. With…