Artificial Intelligence and Hybrid Crypto Giza Raises $3 Million to Bring Machine Learning to Blockchain

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AI is still all the rage, and some startups with a leaning towards crypto are looking to feed off the machine learning buzz to raise capital, including recently created Giza.

Founded in October by Cem Dagdelen, Fran Algaba and Ren Korzay, the company announced on Tuesday that it had received $3 million in a pre-seed round led by CoinFund. Other participants included StarkWare, TA Ventures and Arrington Capital, the venture capital firm of the founders of TechCrunch.

Algaba, CEO of Gizas, declined to comment on the implied valuation of his startups.

Einar Braathen, an investor at CoinFund, said in a statement that Algabas is set to be one of the first projects that brings AI to smart contracts and significantly expands their design space.

The investment comes as venture capital funding for crypto startups continues to decline. While the AI ​​gold rush has stalled amid a larger downturn in venture capital funding, according to Crunchbase, the nearly $58 billion raised by AI startups in the second quarter of 2023 far exceeds the roughly $2.3 billion amassed by crypto firms. It’s no wonder, then, that AI-themed cryptocurrencies outperformed Bitcoin at the start of the year. (Price gains have cooled off, however, as AI fever has eased slightly.)

Algaba comes from the world of AI, not crypto. He was head of machine learning at Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, a Spanish multinational bank, before moving to a similar role at sneaker giant Adidas.

In 2019, he started getting into crypto, more as a hobby, but recently, while running Web3 events in Madrid and Barcelona, ​​he decided to take the professional plunge. He teamed up with Dagdelen and Korzay after meeting them at Web3 gatherings he hosted.

Blockchains like Ethereum are essentially slow, decentralized computers, and it is currently impossible to run compute-intensive AI models on them. At the moment, there is no clear way to bring AI into the blockchain space, Algaba told Fortune.

That’s why some companies, including Giza, are turning to zero-knowledge proofs, a trendy cryptographic technique popular in the Web3 world. Businesses can run AI models on regular, faster computers and prove that the calculation was done correctly with a proof, which requires much less computing power to verify on a blockchain.

However, for most developers who have no knowledge of zero-knowledge proofs, this exploit is a lift. This is where Giza comes in, which currently has 12 employees. What Algaba and its co-founders are building is a platform for AI developers to easily generate zero-knowledge proofs for AI. models.

And with the new capital injection, Algaba told Fortune, they plan to release the infrastructure behind their platform next week and fully launch their platform by the end of 2023.

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