A16z Crypto Leads $15M Seed Round Into Decentralized AI Data Layer Poseidon

Venture capital heavyweight a16z Crypto led a $15 million seed-round investment into Poseidon, a decentralized artificial intelligence (AI) data layer.

Poseidon is built to provide access to training data for robotics and AI models that is “traceable, enforceable and monetizable,” according to an emailed announcement on Tuesday.

The project was incubated by intellectual property (IP)-based protocol Story, another a16z portfolio company. Story aims to convert IP into programmable assets that can be licensed and managed using smart contracts on blockchains.

“AI foundation models have already exhausted the most easily accessible training data,” a16z Crypto’s managing partner, Chris Dixon, said in the email.

“Poseidon’s decentralized data layer seeks to establish a new economic foundation for the internet, rewarding creators and suppliers for providing the diverse inputs that next-gen intelligent systems need.”

AI models, especially generative AI, are trained on vast datasets — often scraped from the internet — which include copyrighted works such as books, art, music and code. Some creatives argue that this constitutes unauthorized use and copyright infringement because their work is being used for commercial purposes without permission or compensation. The practice has already led to several lawsuits.

This friction highlights how AI and blockchain technology can interact, with decentralization helping to provide secure, controlled sharing of data and allowing multiple parties to contribute to large-language model training without compromising privacy or proprietary information.

The creation of diverse datasets opens up possibilities for data monetization, with creators being compensated for the use of their works.