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 models that are split across geographically separated devices connected only over the internet. It guarantees public access to strong base models, the ability for anyone to participate in the economic benefits of AI, and unlocks open innovation. There may be no technical challenge today that has a larger impact,” said Alexander Long, Founder and CEO Pluralis Research.
Protocol Learning
Protocol Learning is a novel approach to training large AI models over open, permissionless networks of globally distributed compute resources. Counter to conventional training methods that require large amounts of capital investment for training runs, Protocol Learning enables open source development to be more technically and economically feasible. Protocol Learning is best suited for large training runs where models are split across devices to preserve the privacy of model weights. The model ‘lives’ within the protocol and never leaves – it is trainable and usable, but unextractable. This framework, where no one party obtains a full copy of the model weights, allows for value to programmatically flow to contributors, and creates economic incentive to contribute to the network. This promotes a more open, transparent, and innovative AI ecosystem that moves away from reliance on large, centralized systems.
Founded in early 2024, Pluralis is a team of ex-FAANG research scientists led by Alexander Long who have spent a number of years working together. The organization is dedicated to solving the research challenges required to realize protocol learning in practice and is currently hiring in all areas.
“At USV, we believe in supporting innovative approaches that push the boundaries of AI and decentralized decision-making,” said Nick Grossman, Partner at Union Square Ventures. “Pluralis Research is pursuing a collaborative intelligence approach in a manner we haven’t seen yet, and we are excited to be a part of their journey.”
“We are extremely proud to be the pre-seed and now seed backer of what we believe to be state-of-the-art work in decentralized AI being done at Pluralis Research,” said Jake Brukhman, Founder and CEO at CoinFund. “This funding will enable Pluralis to accelerate the development of its protocol learning model and start bringing its decentralized network to market.”
For more information, visit pluralis.ai.
About Pluralis Research
Pluralis Research is an AI research organization that is developing true open-source AI through decentralized, model-parallel training. Pluralis Research’s approach, termed Protocol Learning, champions not only a decentralized and collaborative training, but ensures models are never fully materialized – and hence remain only within the protocol, facilitating programmatic value flow to training participants. Founded in 2024 by Alexander Long, and staffed by PhD Researchers from Amazon, Pluralis Research is backed by USV and CoinFund, Bodhi Ventures, Variant, and Balaji Srinivasan. For the latest updates, follow Pluralis on X.
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