Sapien, a startup that incentivizes people to supply all sorts of data for use in AI, has raised $10.5 million in seed funding led by VC firm Variant, with participation from Primitive Ventures, Animoca, Yield Game Guild and HF0.
The Sapien team, led by Rowan Stone, the former co-creator of Coinbase’s layer 2 network Base, and Trevor Koverko, founder of Polymath and author of RWA standard ERC1400, are incentivizing a growing army of data labelling workers with with either USDC stablecoin or a system of reward points. The data work can be anything from labelling everyday items like traffic signs using a mobile device, to pinpointing particular types of cancer cells.
AI is often framed in terms of some insidious dystopian creep that will gradually take over our lives. Less talked about is the flipside, where entirely new forms of work can be created, in this case a global pool of decentralized AI workers.
