Crypto Venture Funds Variant, 1kx Lead $6M Funding Round for ZK-Meets-AI Startup Modulus

Modulus Labs, the company behind a new specialized zero-knowledge prover for AI models, announced Wednesday that it is launching and has raised $6M in a seed round.

The round was led by Variant and 1kx, and includes participation from Inflection, Bankless, Stanford and others. Angel investors include names in the blockchain ecosystem like the Ethereum Foundation, Worldcoin, Polygon, Celestia and Solana, according to Modulus.

Modulus makes use of ZKML – an acronym for zero-knowledge machine learning – and combines ZK proofs for AI models. The point of it is to use zero knowledge proofs to prove that an AI model was executed correctly.

The funding will go to helping build the Modulus product, co-founder Daniel Shorr told CoinDesk.

“Our audience is basically smart contract devs or on-chain services who want to add AI,” Shorr said. “But up until now anyways, to add AI into your smart contract, means throwing away this whole blockchain security.”