The firm building the verifiable compute layer, Space and Time (SxT) Labs, announced today that it has raised $20 million in Series A funding to maintain its position as the industry leader at the nexus of blockchain and artificial intelligence. With the Series A equity funding, the firm has raised $50 million in total so far. Funds from the most recent round will be used to improve ecosystem and community growth, as well as expedite product and technical development.
Framework Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, Arrington Capital, and Hivemind Capital led the investment. Microsoft’s M12 Ventures, DCG, F-Prime Capital, OKX Ventures, Circle Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and a number of other notable investors are among the other participating investors. This fundraising round comes after a September 2022 $20 million strategic funding round headed by Microsoft’s M12 Ventures.
Nate Holiday, Co-Founder and CEO of SxT stated:
“We are thrilled to announce our Series A funding round backed by our world-class investors in order to accelerate an equitable AI future for internet users. Space and Time is committed to empowering the community to own their future in an AI-powered world by providing the tools they need to build next-gen applications at the intersection of AI and blockchain.”
The foundation for true community ownership is laid by blockchain technology, which enables people to develop apps, deploy them across their communities, and establish their own economies based on their creative output. Blockchain gives people the freedom to own what they build, opening the door to a better economic future as AI continues to transform the job market and the global economy. SxT will continue to be essential in driving this new wave of community-driven AI innovation by giving developers access to the data, tools, and infrastructure they need to create cutting-edge blockchain and AI applications.
The SxT network combines three key technologies:
Blockchain indexing:
SxT gathers extensive data from popular chains including Ethereum, Bitcoin, ZKsync, Polygon, Sui, Aptos, and Sei and gives it to network developers for free.
Data warehouse:
Now that the SxT data warehouse is now in general availability, developers may use SQL to examine the indexed blockchain data as well as customer-loaded offchain datasets. SxT has shown tremendous adoption and growth since the data warehouse’s debut, averaging over 5.3 billion database requests each month and seeing a 300% increase in annual recurring revenue (ARR) over the previous year.
ZK coprocessor:
Proof of SQL, the first sub-second zero-knowledge (“ZK”) coprocessor that enables trustless data processing at scale, was released in June, according to a statement from SxT. Using this novel ZK technology, the team has been closely collaborating with its corporate partners on a ground-breaking approach to building verifiable large language models (LLMs).
World-class researchers in cryptography and AI who have previously achieved significant advances in ZK, blockchain, and AI make up the SxT team. To expedite the development of its generative AI tools, Microsoft shared in a blog that the M12 portfolio business has been closely collaborating with the Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Lab. Microsoft and the SxT research team are now developing a cutting-edge approach to AI-powered app development.
Michael Anderson, Co-Founder of Framework Ventures stated:
“We have long believed in SxT, particularly given their commitment to solving the infrastructure needs of blockchain, having first invested in the company back in 2022. SxT is actively solving infrastructure problems, which in turn is ushering in more applications that are exciting users and amplifying interest. That is why our support has been unwavering and we hold steadfast in our belief that Proof of SQL solves for the need to ensure applications globally that are being run on centralized databases are no longer tamperable. At Framework, we believe that blockchain is critical and it is through companies like SxT that we will be able to advance the use cases – not only within the DeFi universe but also TradFi and AI.”
