TL;DR
- Vana has secured $25 million in total funding, including a $5 million strategic round led by Coinbase Ventures.
- The platform uses data DAOs to allow users to monetize their private information and contribute to AI models.
- The project aims to solve the shortage of data for training AI by offering a decentralized data ownership network.
Vana, a Web3 startup focused on creating user-owned data networks, has managed to raise a total of $25 million in funding.
This funding includes a recent $5 million strategic round led by Coinbase Ventures, an $18 million Series A backed by Paradigm and a $2 million seed investment led by Polychain.
The company seeks to solve a crucial problem facing the artificial intelligence industry: the lack of sufficient data to train AI models, especially those that rely on private data protected by technology platforms.
Vana‘s proposal is based on the creation of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) that allow users to pool their data and monetize it by selling it to AI researchers.
These DAOs allow information that is normally trapped in closed platforms such as social networks or email services to be used ethically and financially rewarded.
Users, by contributing their data, not only receive direct compensation, but also acquire a stake in the AI models developed with that data.
The first DAO Vana launched allowed Reddit users to monetize their activity history on the platform, attracting over 140,000 people in a short time.
According to Anna Kazlauskas, co-founder and CEO of Vana, users with the most “karma” on Reddit could earn between $300 and $400 for contributing their data.
The platform is looking to expand to more than a dozen DAOs in the future, each dedicated to different data sources, although it has not yet officially launched its mainnet.
A future powered by Vana decentralized data
With funding secured, Vana plans to accelerate the development of its EVM-compatible blockchain, a key infrastructure to support collective ownership of private digital assets.
This network also offers native support for data pooling through DAOs and rewards for the 16 most liquid data pools, incentivizing the creation of new data communities.
In addition to its Reddit DAO, Vana has already attracted other major projects to its testnet, including a LinkedIn Data DAO and a Twitter Data DAO, suggesting that interest in this data monetization model is growing.
According to Kazlauskas, information from closed platforms, such as those that require login, has exponentially greater value compared to public data available on the web.
Vana is working to harness this value while ensuring that data owners are fairly rewarded.
Financial backing from major investors such as Coinbase Ventures and Paradigm underscores the confidence that Vana’s model has the potential to transform the way data is used and valued in the age of AI.
With this network of DAOs, Vana could not only solve the data shortage for AI researchers, but also empower users, allowing them to become active participants and owners of the future of artificial intelligence.
