OpenGradient, the compute layer for verifiable AI, this week announced $9.5 million in total funding to scale its network for open, auditable model execution.
Major investors include a16z crypto, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, SV Angel, Foresight Ventures, Pragma, SALT, Symbolic Capital, Canonical Crypto, Black Dragon, NEAR, Celestia, and Thanefield Capital. Angel investors include Balaji Srinivasan (ex-Coinbase CTO), Illia Polosukhin (co-founder, NEAR), Sandeep Nailwal (co-founder, Polygon), Bruno Faviero (Magna), Daniel Cheung and Ryan Watkins (Syncracy Capital), and Ekram Ahmed (Celestia).
AI is becoming the backbone of software, finance, and autonomous agents, but the infrastructure it runs on remains opaque. Developers building AI-native applications today face a choice: trust black-box cloud endpoints, or build costly verification layers from scratch. As AI moves from assistive tooling to autonomous execution (making trades, managing assets, issuing decisions) that opacity becomes a systemic risk.
OpenGradient describes itself as the Network for Open Intelligence — a decentralized infrastructure network designed to host, execute, and verify AI models at scale. Rather than functioning as a standalone blockchain, OpenGradient operates as a specialized AI coprocessor.
It enables other applications, blockchains, or agents to outsource computationally-heavy tasks to a dedicated network of specialized GPU and Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) nodes for computation. For example, a company can run AI workloads such as sybil detection or content generation on OpenGradient, with clients independently verifying results by querying cryptographic proofs from the network.
“The AI stack is consolidating around a handful of closed providers, and the applications being built on top have no way to audit what’s running underneath,” said Matthew Wang, co-founder and CEO of OpenGradient. “We’re building the open alternative — infrastructure where models are inspectable, execution is provable, and developers own the intelligence their products depend on. This funding lets us scale that vision.”
