Dbrain, a startup that “turns raw data into real-world AI,” has just raised $5.7 million from Angelvest and Bitfury Group. Two distinct deals were closed in late July, the startup’s press service told us: an equity and a private token sale, of $3 million and $2.7 million respectively, with a group of cryptocurrency traders contributing to the token sale.
In February, the startup had received 2,5 million in a round led by Chronobank and Suicide Ventures. Thus DBrain has raised some $8 million in total to develop further its platform.
The fundraising process is still going on, however. With Dbrain reaching just a bit more than a fourth of its hard cap fundraising goal, “the investment from Bitfury, AngelVest, and other partners has opened new possibilities for Dbrain’s token, extending the token sale to bring more strategic partners onboard,” according to a press release.
The latest deals also involve a “strategic partnership,” with Dbrain using Bitfury’s core product Exonum, an extensible framework for blockchain projects.
Headquartered in California but with a predominantly Russian team, Dbrain was founded last year by Dmitry Matskevich. He is the creator of Icon8, a popular AI chatbot, and co-founder of Flocktory, a successful Russian CRM startup.
Dbrain is developing is platform as “an end-to-end AI production solution” that “links teams of crowdworkers and data scientists to prepare datasets, to develop and to train AI models.”
“Crowdworkers do simple tasks of image labeling and data validation. We implement the cutting-edge blockchain protocol SPOCK to automatically verify data quality and to guarantee transparent, real-time billing to crowdworkers,” the startup explains on its site.
“We are ready to launch our beta version,” the startup’s press service told us. The startup intends to take part in such major industry events as TechCrunch Disrupt and Web Summit later this year.
Bitfury, on its side, announced that it plans to continue investing in “promising blockchain-based companies this year.”
