Microsoft-Backed Blockchain Startup Secures $20M Series A For Fusion With AI
Space and Time has raised $50 million to date. Credit: VCG
Key Takeaways
- The new Series A funding round brings Space and Time’s total funding to $50 million.
- Space and Time believe blockchain is the answer to some of AI’s most pressing issues.
- AI agents are growing in popularity and becoming more robust, heightening the need for verification and security.
Microsoft-backed blockchain startup Space and Time has raised a further $20 million in a Series A funding round in its pursuit of tackling AI issues with blockchain technology.
The round was led by Framework Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, Arrington Capital, and Hivemind Capital.
What Is Space and Time’s Mission?
The startup aims to provide developers with data and infrastructure to improve the development of apps “at the intersection” of AI and blockchain.
Space and Time wants to tackle the issue of verifiability in AI. In many cases with AI applications, there is no insight into where an answer to a question came from – and in turn, no verification that it is correct.
Speaking to Fortune, cofounder and CEO Nate Holiday said: “[We’re] moving to an AI-powered world, meaning you don’t know what is being generated by AI and what is being generated by a person or corporations.
“We think it’s super critical to sit right in the middle of this to ensure that as applications are being built in this new world, powered by Space and Time, you have this verifiability, trust, and transparency.”
In September 2022, Space and Time raised $20 million in a strategic funding round led by M12, the venture arm of Microsoft.
The new round has brought the company’s total funding to $50 million.
AI and the blockchain
With AI agents growing in popularity and becoming more robust, Space and Time wants to be the blockchain-native database on which new AI applications rely.
Blockchain technology, in theory, can significantly enhance and support AI in various ways.
As AI models require vast amounts of data for training, information scraped from the internet, and other sources may not always be reliable.
Blockchain Verification
Space and Time aims to combine on-chain and off-chain data in a single environment, enabling companies to do sweeping analytics and make fast transactions.
The company based its Proof of SQL technology on the popular database programming language SQL.
The technology enables businesses to run an SQL query on blockchain data while providing proof that the query hasn’t been tampered with.
In effect, Space and Time has created a Web3 warehouse by indexing major blockchains to create a relational database that is easy for enterprises to interact with.
In 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made headlines with his new cryptocurrency project, WorldCoin. The startup provided free cryptocurrency tokens to anyone who allowed its “orb“ to scan their iris.
The device would then turn the scan into a numerical string to be used on biometric identifiers, acting as a digital passport and proving you were human in a world increasingly full of deep fakes and AI bots.
WorldCoin has not been a runaway success, mainly because people were not willing to give up biometric data to a startup for a few free tokens.
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