Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, 17 January 2025, Pakinomist
Reppo Labs, a Crypto x AI company spun out of Protocol Labs Venture Studio in March 2024, has successfully raised $2.2 million in funding to develop critical infrastructure that enables permissionless collaboration on niche datasets between data owners/warehouses and AI developers and agents. Using Reppo as connective tissue, AI agents can directly communicate needs and negotiate data access from owners across the spectrum without intermediaries, freeing up price discovery and demand for data that would otherwise remain siloed. To facilitate this, the team is building an intent-centric data exchange, powered by Anoma and secured by the Gateway Protocol.
Reppo’s unique approach leverages programmable IP co-ownership as the incentive mechanism to ensure fair use and compensation for data owners – who may not know the immediate value of their data – to benefit from downstream revenues generated by derivative IP and its use.
Raghav (RG) Rmadya, CEO and Founder of Reppo Labs, commented
“Anyone who claims to build a blockchain specifically for AI is most likely a scam. It’s nothing more than a narrative play. Most blockchains today can already support agentic workflows and AI applications. The more likely future is that each agent or application will have its own In such a world, models, agents and applications will need permissionless ways to get their fuel, i.e. data to grow and stay relevant spoon-feeding AI will soon be over.
Unfortunately, current data sources and pipelines are drying up. Ilya Sutskever highlighted this issue at NeurIPS last year, and the recent acquisition of Carbon by Perplexity underscores the growing demand for new data connectors in the AI industry. Web3 has experimented with DataDAOs as a potential solution, but they have yet to prove scalable. Not all data in the world is user-owned; corporate data is vast and often untapped. For example, DePIN node operators generate huge amounts of operational data that may seem mundane to some, but is gold to us.
Incentives for these data owners are completely lacking. When off-chain dark data becomes available to AI builders and agents, amazing things can happen. An example is our work incubating AI auditors for solar farms on the Glow Network. Trained solely on off-chain data, these auditors automate and decentralize network audits that currently rely on centralized actors. The same applies to many other DePINs.
The Crypto x AI ecosystem is hungry for niche and new data – the ‘good nectar’. Anyone building ‘decentralized’ models or agents today either relies on the same on-chain data streams, pre-cleaned and parameterized datasets, or centralized LLMs trained on just 0.1% of the world’s data while competing in a zero sum game. It’s ironic to say the least.”
Brad Holden, Partner at Protocol VC, said:
“What excites us about Reppo is the team’s ability to contextualize and solve challenges they encountered during their time on for the broader Web3 and AI ecosystem. Their focus on making off-chain data available to build practical AI/ML models and agents are essential for tackling bottlenecks like insurance underwriting, node auditing and SLA management for blockchain networks, especially for DePINs, which we at Protocol VC are ultra bullish on Few teams have such a systems approach to solving ugly problems, and it was a no-brainer for us to partner with Reppo. I’m ecstatic about their mission to democratize permission-free access to previously untapped data for AI developers and agents.”
The $2.2 million funding included participation from Protocol Labs, CV VC, CMS Holdings, and a significant portion was raised on Echo.xyz, the first allocation sold out in less than 10 minutes. Notable angel investors include Charles Songhurst, Lincoln of MH Ventures, Dieter Fishbein of Anoma, Thomas France (co-founder of Ledger), Nicolas Pinto (Cygni Labs) and more.
About Reppo
Reppo is the permissionless coordination layer for AI Systems to collaborate with Data, Infra and Capital, democratizing access to resources and empowering developers and agents to build what they want. Headquartered in the Cayman Islands, the team consists of global talent with deep expertise in AI/ML, blockchain, crypto and Web3 ecosystems.
Users can learn more about and follow Reppo on Twitter (X) and LinkedIn.
Contactmanaging directorRG RmadyaReppo Labs[email protected]
