Mira, a crypto-AI startup focused on building decentralized machine-learning infrastructure, has emerged from stealth, raising $9 million in a seed funding round.
Bitkraft Ventures and Framework Ventures co-led the round, Mira said Tuesday. Other investors in the round include Accel, Mechanism Capital, Folius Ventures and AJ Scaramucci’s SALT Fund.
Mira was founded earlier this year, began fundraising in April and closed the seed round in June, co-founder Karan Sirdesai, formerly an investor at Accel, told The Block. He declined to comment on the round’s structure, valuation or whether Mira offered board seats to investors.
Mira’s other co-founder is Sidhartha Doddipalli, who previously co-founded and served as chief technology officer at Stader Labs, a crypto liquid staking platform.
What is Mira?
Mira is building a decentralized AI infrastructure platform to help developers quickly build AI-native apps. “AI is moving at such a rapid pace that even though we are witnessing innovations flower around us, the average developer is being left behind due to poor infrastructure to be able to consume AI,” Sirdesai said.
Mira’s AI infrastructure includes a library of workflows or a toolkit with preconfigured instructions that simplify AI app development. These flows are developed and maintained by a community of developers, allowing them to monetize their contributions, Sirdesai said.
“Unlike web2 marketplaces, Miraʼs platform encourages sovereign ownership of your AI flows as well as transparent attribution and settlement for value flows in the network,” Sirdesai said. “Every stakeholder knows what they are paying for and how they are monetizing.”
Mira’s first ecosystem app
Sirdesai mentioned that over a dozen projects in web2 and web3 domains are using Mira’s infrastructure to develop AI applications, with many set to launch in the coming months. Klok, Mira’s first ecosystem product, is a crypto chatbot built on 500+ static and real-time datasets and is currently in closed beta, Sirdesai added.
In the future, Mira plans to launch its blockchain to record all platform transactions, though it’s undecided whether it will be a Layer 1 or Layer 2 blockchain, Sirdesai said. He declined to comment on whether Mira would issue its token.
Mira currently employs 25 people in Singapore and India, and Sirdesai plans to expand the team by hiring at least five more people for the engineering function.
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