We’re thrilled to announce the close of a $7M seed round led by Polychain Capital and Lightspeed Faction. The round includes additional participation from Chapter One, LongHash, Bankless Ventures, Republic Digital, Nomad Capital, CoinSummer Labs, Third Earth Capital, and notable angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan, Illia Polosukhin, Sandeep Nailwal, Casey Caruso, Tekin Salimi, and Santiago Santos.

The capital will be used to advance the development of Hyperbolic’s open-access AI cloud, including hiring key engineers and expanding the infrastructure developers and researchers rely on to access high-performance AI services.

This seed round builds on a pre-seed investment of $725K from Chapter One, Modular Capital, Samsung Next, Blizzard Fund by Avalanche, IMO Ventures, SNZ Holding, and Ausvic Capital in November 2022.

Yuchen Jin, Co-Founder and CTO at Hyperbolic, said, “We are thankful for investors who align with our vision of simplifying and expanding access to AI cloud capabilities through a reliable, cost-effective platform. The AI industry remains in its early stages, and we believe Hyperbolic can play a crucial role as an infrastructure partner for developers, researchers, and teams building the next generation of AI applications.”

Today, AI companies spend a significant portion of their capital on compute resources, creating an industry-wide bottleneck driven by cost, availability, and distribution challenges. Hyperbolic addresses this issue by building scalable infrastructure that brings together GPU compute and inference services in one accessible platform. Our goal is to help developers and researchers access the compute and models they need to build, test, and deploy AI applications without being slowed down by infrastructure constraints.

Olaf Carlson-Wee, Founder and CEO of Polychain Capital, commented: “Hyperbolic is building toward a future where AI development is more open, accessible, and transparent. By making compute and inference more affordable, Hyperbolic gives researchers and developers around the world more room to experiment, build, and scale.”

Hyperbolic’s first product is an AI inference service designed to deliver high performance at a fraction of the cost. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on a single GPU type, Hyperbolic’s heterogeneous compute approach uses a compiling stack to optimize tensor operators across multiple hardware backends, including Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

This allows builders and researchers to access powerful open-source AI models through a simple API call, with performance comparable to well-known centralized solutions. Developers can use Hyperbolic’s platform to run inference and build applications using models such as Llama 3.1 405B, Cambrian, MeloTTS, and Stable Diffusion.

Anyone can begin running inference at app.hyperbolic.ai/models.

Verification and confidentiality remain important challenges in AI services like inference, particularly when users need confidence that models are being served correctly and securely. Hyperbolic addresses this with its novel Proof of Sampling protocol, developed in collaboration with UC Berkeley and Columbia University. This protocol is designed to help verify that compute resources and model outputs are delivered accurately, strengthening trust in AI infrastructure.

We are also building a GPU marketplace that offers an intuitive and automated interface for renting GPU compute. The marketplace is designed to make it easier for developers, researchers, and AI teams to access GPU resources quickly, without long procurement cycles or complex setup processes.

We are currently inviting users to join the waitlist to test our alpha product at app.hyperbolic.ai/compute.

Jasper Zhang, Co-Founder and CEO at Hyperbolic, added, “Our vision is clear: the future of AI is collaborative. We are a team of researchers and developers focused on making AI services easier to access, verify, and trust. Hyperbolic exists to give builders the infrastructure they need to explore, build, and innovate.”

Looking ahead, we plan to continue expanding Hyperbolic’s GPU marketplace and inference services for developers and researchers worldwide. Our focus is on making high-performance AI infrastructure more accessible, affordable, and reliable, so more teams can participate in the next wave of AI development.

Zhang concluded, “Hyperbolic’s dual focus on GPU accessibility and open-access AI services sets it apart in the industry. As we expand our GPU marketplace and AI services for developers and researchers around the world, we are just scratching the surface of what is possible.”

About Hyperbolic

Hyperbolic is the Open-Access AI Cloud, giving researchers, startups, developers, and AI-native companies fast, flexible access to high-performance GPU capacity. The platform helps teams start on demand, scale programmatically, and grow into reserved infrastructure without long waitlists, rigid contracts, or complex procurement cycles.

Founded by award-winning math and AI researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of Washington, Hyperbolic is committed to making advanced AI infrastructure more accessible to builders around the world.

About Polychain Capital

Polychain Capital is an investment firm backing early-stage technology companies and protocols across emerging infrastructure markets. For more information, visit www.polychain.capital.

About Lightspeed Faction

Lightspeed Faction is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in technology companies building at the frontier of software, infrastructure, and emerging networks.

For more information, please visit www.faction.vc.

About Lightspeed Faction's Relationship with Lightspeed

Faction Ventures, LLC ("Faction") and Lightspeed Management Company, L.L.C. ("Lightspeed") are separate businesses that operate independently of each other. Faction is a registered investment adviser under the United States Investment Advisers Act of 1940, as amended. Faction advises its own fund(s) and does not advise any Lightspeed clients, and Lightspeed does not advise Faction or any of its clients.