Tech Optimist Episode #47: Sahara AI: The Company Creating a Collaborative AI Economy

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  Sam:
  Is your AI on the blockchain? If not, it should be.

  Sean Ren:
  So, that triggered me to think about a new space of a problem for AI, which is ownership, copyrights, and provenance. To approach this problem, Sahara AI is building a blockchain platform that truly advocates for and implements the idea of sovereignty and provenance for AI. With that, we’ve built on top of the blockchain layer an execution layer that provides the AI infrastructure to serve the entire life cycle of building an AI model—from dataset to model to application.

  Sam:
  All right. Welcome back to this episode of The Tech Optimist. We have another Meet the Startup episode for you today and our guest company is Sahara AI. The lead of this episode is Ray Wu, Managing Partner at Alumni Ventures. He’s awesome—a great host for this podcast. Our guest entrepreneur today is Sean Ren, the Co-Founder of Sahara AI.

  And of course, you’ll hear my voice. My name is Sam, and I’m the guide and editor for this show. Let’s get into it. We’re back at it.

  A little bit about the conversation today: Sahara AI is a decentralized AI blockchain platform designed to empower users to own, control, and monetize their AI data assets. It shows how you can integrate AI with blockchain technology to create a distributed and transparent AI ecosystem.

  Ray and Sean talk a lot about provenance when it comes to this AI technology, the life cycle of AI datasets and applications, and how important it is to protect this AI and its sovereignty. This is an emerging aspect of the field that has become Sahara AI’s niche, and I think they capture it very well. They also recently secured another massive round of fundraising—congratulations to them. We’ll hear more about that here shortly.

  This is a very clear and concise episode. The narrative is wonderful, and Ray and Sean have a really cool conversation. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode. I’ll see you in a bit.

  As a reminder, The Tech Optimist podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not personalized advice and is not an offer to buy or sell securities. For additional important details, please see the text description accompanying this episode.

  Ray Wu:
  Hi, my name is Ray Wu. I’m a Managing Partner of Alumni Ventures. Today, I’m talking to Sean, Founder of Sahara AI. We invested in Sahara AI last year and continue to support the company in its latest round of funding.

  Sean, thanks again for joining us today. Before we get started, maybe you can introduce yourself and the company so that we can get a sense of the progress and your background as well.

  Sean Ren:
  Thank you, Ray. I’m glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Hi everyone, I’m Sean Ren. I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Sahara AI, and I’m also an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California.

  My background is an interesting mix of academia and industry. I’ve been working in AI—more specifically, natural language processing—for over 15 years. Before starting Sahara in 2023 with Tyler, my co-founder, I spent almost seven years as an Associate Professor in USC’s Computer Science department.

  There, I worked with my PhD students on general AI problems. Back then, we were still trying to make AI more general, cheaper, and more efficient to deploy for different personal or customized use cases. The particular topics I focused on included federated learning frameworks to better customize models with business or local user data, how to protect user privacy, and how to build trust by explaining to users what the AI is really doing when making decisions for them.

  That gave me great exposure to cutting-edge research across the AI landscape and helped me form the thesis for Sahara AI.

  Meanwhile, during my third year at USC, I started part-time consulting for Snapchat, working with their data team to better predict user engagement with AI technologies and build more personalized models. The learning from that experience has hugely influenced my current principles at Sahara—striking the right balance between technological advancement and tangible solutions that can be deployed at scale.

  Before USC, I spent a year as a postdoc at Stanford, which set me on a path to focus on AI and, particularly, natural language technologies. I did my PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign over five years.

  An interesting highlight is that I had my first entrepreneurial experience in my third year of the PhD program. I worked with two PhD colleagues to start a company called Style Puzzle, which used deep learning to build a recommender system for fashion. We aimed to digitize users’ closets and suggest the best daily outfit matches.

  My biggest takeaway from that experience—which lasted about a year and a half—was that startups aren’t just about building a good product and finding users. You also have to manage business operations, marketing, project management, and people management. I learned a lot about potential failure points and challenges beyond product and technology. Those lessons remain very valuable as I build Sahara with Tyler today.

  Sam:
  That’s one of my favorite things about this show and podcast—virtually meeting all these people. While editing and listening, you really get to understand each person.

  Sean’s background is a perfect example. He’s a professor alongside his startup work, which is such a unique aspect of who he is. It gives more context about the kind of person he is and what he brings to the Sahara.

  We’ll now dive deeper into the specifics of Sahara AI. But first, we’ll do a quick ad break, then get right back into it.

  Sophia:
  Hey everyone, just taking a quick break to tell you about the AI Fund from Alumni Ventures. Alumni Ventures is one of the only VC firms focused on making venture capital accessible to individual investors like you. In fact, Alumni Ventures is one of the most active and highly rated VCs in the U.S., and we co-invest alongside renowned lead investors.

  With our AI Fund, you’ll have the opportunity to invest in a portfolio built entirely around advancements in AI. This fund consists of 15 to 20 investments in multiple fields where AI is making a huge impact—including machine learning, healthcare, education, transportation, and more.

  To get started, visit us at av.vc/funds/aifund. Now, back to the show.

  Sean Ren:
  And right now—

  Ray Wu:
  Yeah, thanks.

  Sean Ren:
  Just to share a little bit about Sahara AI: the context for starting Sahara is interesting. Back in 2022, I was talking to Tyler about how, after working in AI for nearly 12–13 years, I was seeing an inflection point. AI models were no longer just toys—they had become much more powerful.

  Number one, they’re very general; they can handle a wide range of tasks. Number two, they’re closer to human performance—often surpassing the average human in tasks like translation, text summarization, or answering scientific questions.

  Sean Ren:
  So, this really changed because in the past, you didn’t worry at all about AI impacting people’s jobs or lives. You saw them as little toys you could play with to make yourself happy. But now, AI can start automating jobs. This means that companies—especially centralized companies—could use AI to replace you.

  The likely negative outcome is that more and more people will start losing jobs and losing their monetization opportunities. That triggered me to think about a new problem space for AI: ownership, copyrights, and provenance.

  Back then, there wasn’t a viable solution to truly protect users’ control over their personal knowledge—most often in the form of data and models of themselves. Without that, users may eventually refuse to share personal data. As a result, AI will become limited because it doesn’t understand individuals well enough to customize solutions for their personal lives and needs. This creates a bottleneck.

  My approach with Tyler to solve this at Sahara AI is to build a blockchain platform that truly advocates for and implements the idea of sovereignty and provenance for AI.

  Sam:
  I think this is very well said, and Sean’s statement has a lot of weight behind it. I want to define sovereignty and provenance in this context.

  Key aspects of sovereignty include supreme authority and independence. Sovereignty means that a governing body, person, or individual business has ultimate authority over its territory or population, making it the highest decision-making power in that jurisdiction.

  A sovereign state, person, or business operates autonomously—it’s not subject to any external authority. Similarly, provenance refers to the origin or source of something, particularly in terms of history and ownership. It’s often used in art, archaeology, and history.

  From what we can see, Sahara AI is flipping this concept to also apply to technology, innovation, and AI.

  Sean Ren:
  We build this with a layered view of how the infrastructure should be constructed. At the most fundamental layer is the Sahara blockchain—an L1 blockchain that supports provenance and ownership utilities.

  For example:

  • Ownership tokens for models, datasets, and agents.

  • Access control for people who need to purchase or access these resources.

  • A provenance structure to trace how a model was created—from building the dataset, to fine-tuning the model, iterating to improve it with human feedback, and finally, developing applications that can start monetizing themselves.

  Using this provenance, we can back-trace and do revenue sharing.

  On top of the blockchain layer, we have the execution layer, which provides the AI infrastructure to serve the entire lifecycle of building an AI model—from dataset to model to application.

  At the very top is the application layer. Here, we interact with developers and users by giving them the basic building blocks to use AI features. This includes a marketplace for interacting with datasets, models, and agents, as well as tools for data collection, labeling, quality assurance, and agent creation.

  Users can customize and deploy their own agents for others to access and pay for. This is the overall layered construction of Sahara AI.

  Ray Wu:
  Nice. Really exciting to have multiple layers as you’ve outlined. I’m curious—from a development and milestone perspective—can you share where you are now, both in terms of fundraising and VC support, as well as your company’s development, customers, and market traction?

  Sean Ren:
  On the product side, we have three main product lines, each offering different features.

  Number one: our foundational block is the Sahara blockchain. It’s an L1 blockchain purpose-built for provenance and sovereignty of AI. We launched its testnet about two months ago. The testnet currently hosts our marketplace product, which I’ll describe shortly.

  The testnet records important transactions and user behaviors on the marketplace—tracking how data is created, how it’s used to fine-tune models, how models are further improved, and so on.

  Number two: our AI infrastructure stack. This builds on our key concept of decentralized LoRa, or low-rank adapter. Decentralized LoRa is a privacy protection method allowing users to build or deploy AI models with local data without transferring that data to external third-party nodes.

  This approach protects user privacy while enabling them to build strong AI models and agents based on current state-of-the-art technology (e.g., open-source models like Llama 3 and Mistral).

  Number three: our application layer products. This includes:

  • A marketplace for dataset collection, labeling, trading, and model publishing.

  • Model monetization tools.

  • Agent creation tools.

  • A no-code and low-code platform for users to create and customize agents using personal data protected via decentralized LoRa.

  By the end of the year, we aim to:

  • Launch our mainnet between Q4 this year and early next year.

  • Release our no-code agent creation platform.

  • Launch model fine-tuning and deployment pipelines as part of the execution layer of our AI infrastructure.
    Sam:
    As the editor of this podcast, I know how confusing some of the technology and concepts around AI and blockchain can be. I really want to commend Sean because he explained his company and what they do in a way that made it easy for me—someone who’s not deeply technical—to truly understand.

  I also want to share a quote from Sahara AI’s research page at saharalabs.ai. At the bottom of the page, Sean Ren wrote:

  “AI development is at an inflection point. On many fronts, AI has started surpassing human performance and automating more and more parts of our life. In the new era, it is critically important to protect the privacy of users, guarantee the provenance of the data and model, and establish a decentralized and trustless network of AI and humans.”

  Okay, one last ad and then we’ll wrap up the interview. Hang tight.

   

  Speaker 5:
  Do you have a venture capital portfolio of cutting-edge startups? Without one, you could be missing out on enormous value creation and a more diversified personal portfolio. Alumni Ventures, ranked a top-20 VC firm by CB Insights, is the leading VC firm for individual investors. Believe in investing in innovation? Visit av.vc/foundation to get started.

   

  Ray Wu:
  Great. Can you share a bit about your latest fundraising round? I know you’re preparing a big announcement. Could you tell us more about it and which VCs are currently supporting Sahara AI?

   

  Sean Ren:
  Totally. We’re very excited about our upcoming fundraising announcement. We’ll be announcing a total raise of $43 million.

  This round includes participation from top-tier venture firms and partners. It’s led by Pantera and Binance Labs, along with Polychain Capital. We’re also joined by many other venture investors from around the world—including partners from Korea, Thailand, other regions in APAC, as well as strong domestic support from U.S. venture firms.

  Of course, this includes Alumni Ventures, whose support we greatly appreciate.

  With this successful fundraise, we plan to allocate funds in three main ways:

  1. Recruiting Top Talent: We’re looking to hire the best experts in AI and Web3 to help us build decentralized infrastructure, privacy protection methods, decentralized AI systems, and application-layer products. (This is also a bit of a hiring shout-out—we’re looking for great people to join our team!)

  2. Expanding Our Community: We’ll use part of the funds to grow our developer community—those who want to build decentralized AI applications on top of Sahara’s blockchain. We’re also considering ecosystem funding programs to support and incentivize developers.

  3. Marketing and Operations: We’ll expand our marketing and operational activities to strengthen our global presence. We’ll be attending major events such as WebX in Japan, Korean Blockchain Week, TOKEN2049 in Singapore, Mainnet, and many others. We look forward to connecting with potential partners at these events.

  Ray Wu:
  That’s exciting! We definitely want to support you as part of our community. Given that Alumni Ventures has a strong network of alumni from top universities and over 600,000 community members, what can we do to best support Sahara AI?

  Sean Ren:
  We’d love to leverage your strong alumni network in a couple of ways:

  1. Ecosystem Collaboration: We want to connect with people building AI applications or general Web3 applications that could benefit from provenance and attribution infrastructure. We’d love to talk with them to see how our features could support their needs. These collaborations will also inspire and help us prioritize features on our roadmap.

  2. Education and Advocacy: The decentralized AI space is rapidly emerging but also nuanced. Many projects come from a crypto-native background but may lack deep AI expertise. Coming from an AI background myself, I see many gaps to bridge between the AI and crypto communities.

  Through Alumni Ventures’ channels, social events, and research pieces, we’d like to educate the community about what makes sense to pursue in decentralized AI and how to do it effectively.

  Ray Wu:
  Absolutely. Taylor and I have been discussing potential joint events during Mainnet and other conferences. Since we have offices in five U.S. cities, we’d be happy to co-host events and bring the AI and Web3 communities together.

  Thanks again, Sean.

  Sean Ren:
  Totally.

  Ray Wu:
  I really appreciate you joining the call today.

  Sean Ren:
  Appreciate the time. I’m really excited to share our upcoming milestones and announcements with you. We want to keep you posted on our progress and hopefully come back for another episode to share future product updates.

  Ray Wu:
  Indeed. Thanks a lot, Sean.

  Sean Ren:
  Thank you, Ray.

  Ray Wu:
  Have a great time in New York, and we’ll catch up soon in person.

  Sean Ren:
  Yes. Cheers. Take care.

  Sam:
  Thanks again for tuning in to The Tech Optimist. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d really appreciate it if you gave us a rating on whichever podcast app you’re using. And remember to subscribe to keep up with each episode.

  The Tech Optimist welcomes any questions, comments, or segment suggestions. Please email us at [email protected] with any of those, and be sure to visit our website at av.vc.

  As always, keep building.