Pluralis Research Pioneers Protocol Learning to Scale Decentralized AI, Announces $7.6M Seed Round Led by USV and CoinFund

MELBOURNE, Australia, March 19, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pluralis Research, an AI company developing true open-source AI through decentralized training, today announced its $7.6M seed funding round co-led by USV and CoinFund with participation from Topology, Variant, Eden Block, and Bodhi Ventures. Angel investors Balaji Srinivasan and Clem Delangue, co-founder of HuggingFace, also participated in the round. Pluralis Research is pioneering a transformative shift in AI development, facilitating collaborative, multi-party training runs that enables individuals to contribute to training large scale foundation models.

Open and Distributed AI Ecosystem

Open weight models have driven frontier AI development and application growth over the past few years. However, they lack economic sustainability as they require centralized tech giants to continue to release models to the public. Pluralis Research is pioneering Protocol Learning, a new approach to model development as it is designed to be co-trained by multiple contributors without any single entity controlling the full model weights. This framework aims to reshape how foundation models are built, creating a more open and distributed AI ecosystem with sustainable economic incentives.

"Pluralis paves the way to true collective ownership at the model layer, by training foundation ...