As the crypto space heats up again, so does funding for new startups. 0G Labsa web3 infrastructure company,” raised $35 million in a pre-seed round, the team told TechCrunch exclusively.
If $35 million sounds like a lot for a pre-seed round, it really is. “To build the core technology, we wanted to raise $5 million initially,” said 0G co-founder Michael Heinrich.
0G, sometimes called ZeroGravity, is building a modular AI blockchain that aims to alleviate the pain points of on-chain AI applications in the web3 ecosystem, such as speed and cost efficiency. Competitors include Celestia and EigenLayer, which also focus on modularity.
Modularity allows developers to choose the components to use to build a blockchain system or application. Like customizing orders in a restaurant, developers will be able to configure elements to best suit their needs.
“Our goal now is to enable any blockchain to be as efficient and cheap as a web2 application,” Heinrich said. “That’s the advantage of this vertebrate approach.”
In contrast, Ethereum, for example, is a monolithic blockchain. This means that there is a data layer, a consensus layer, and operations that are only done by a blockchain. It cannot be pulled, making it difficult to adjust. And to engage the central AI technologies that exist today, that basic infrastructure needs to be built, Heinrich said.
When co-founders Heinrich, Ming Wu, Fan Long and Thomas Yao first met, they had conversations with other market players and found that there was a clear message in the market that this aspect of data availability and data storage is really critical, not just for scaling blockchain systems, but to make on-chain AI even a possibility,” Heinrich said. “There was infrastructure that was missing and we had a strong commitment to build it.”
Wu and Long were part of the founding team on a “hybrid blockchain,” the Conflux Network. Yao was a founding partner at IMO Ventures. and Heinrich founded garten, formerly Oh My Green, which offers healthy food and workplace wellness services.
There is a need for decentralized storage and “for it to be fully decentralized, for lack of better words,” Heinrich said. And the data pipeline should be wide enough that many users can use it at a time. “So that’s what we’re enabling: scalability and storage of the models so we can then collaborate with others doing the execution layer.”
“The investor community realized that this was a key unlock for the space, so we got a number of term sheets very quickly,” Heinrich said. “As soon as we selected our lead as a Hack VC, the floodgates opened and we were 20x oversubscribed. We had over $100 million in interest and partnered with the investors we thought could help us the most.”
Investors from more than 40 native crypto institutions also participated, including Alliance, Animoca Brands, Delphi Digital, Stanford Builders Fund, Symbolic Capital, and OKX Ventures, to name a few. 0G declined to disclose its valuation.
The large table of distributed funds is in line with web3 prices, Heinrich said. “It’s a community-driven ethos and effort, and that’s why we decided we needed to get more capital as a result to have the right partners.”
The seed capital will be used to hire engineers and build the functionality of the 0G market, community and ecosystem.
And as of now, 0G doesn’t have its own token, but “it’s a web3 company,” Heinrich said, “so we will release a token in the future, but we can’t say more at this time.”
Emphasis on high performance
The chain claims it will be super fast and cheap compared to competitors. The goal is to focus on high security and performance, which is the ability of the network to process many transactions within a certain time frame, on its chain. Its throughput will be 50 Gbps, compared with competitor rates of 1.5 MBps, he said.
AI and on-chain games require fast data flow. Without fast and efficient performance, costs can increase. The current one “isn’t fast enough, so we built an extremely high-performance data pipeline,” Heinrich said.
Over time, it wants to reach “infinite capacity,” similar to how Amazon’s web server allows developers to deploy as many servers as they need, 0G wants to deploy as many consensus networks as possible. A consensus network brings all the nodes of a blockchain together and in agreement on a set of data.
Reaching new use cases
Once the chain is fully functional and on the mainnet, meaning it’s a working, public blockchain, any Web2.0 application can be built on-chain, Heinrich said. The company plans to launch on the mainnet by the third quarter of this year.
Heinrich sees the ideal early members and users of the ecosystem as layer 2 blockchains such as Polygon and Arbitrum, which are focused on scaling the Ethereum ecosystem, as well as high-performance teams building decentralized applications that require high bandwidth and plan to bring hundreds millions of users.
It also plans to enable new use cases and things not possible before, such as on-chain AI, on-chain gaming, and high-frequency decentralized finance (DeFi). 0G claims that the gas costs or fees per transaction are “essentially negligible at this point”.
This, in turn, will enable more AI applications to evolve and address larger issues in the chain.
In the short term, it plans to capitalize on many use cases and support “things that are hard to solve,” from deep false detection on the AI side to building decentralized models and helping high-performance use cases on the blockchain side.
“We want it to be a public good and serve humanity, and it can take many different shapes or forms,” Heinrich said.
