Poseidon Secures $15M Seed Funding to Bridge AI’s Data Gap in Physical World Applications

Poseidon, a decentralized AI data layer built on Story Protocol, has emerged from stealth with $15 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz's crypto arm. The startup aims to solve the critical shortage of licensed, provenance-rich training data required for next-generation AI systems transitioning from text to physical world applications.

The funding round saw participation from prominent industry backers betting on Poseidon's protocol-level solution for data provenance and licensing. Co-founded by AI researcher Sandeep Chinchali and engineer Sarick Shah, the platform focuses on curating long-tail physical data - from first-person chore videos to multilingual speech recordings - while embedding intellectual property rights at the infrastructure level.

Poseidon's framework addresses four Core flaws in current AI training pipelines, beginning with a demand-first approach that reverses traditional data collection models. As AI systems increasingly interact with physical environments, the battle for high-quality training data has entered a new phase where licensing and attribution become non-negotiable requirements.