Web3 AI platform MyShell raises $11 million in funding round led by Dragonfly

MyShell, a Web3-enabled AI platform focused on creators, raised $11 million in a pre-Series A funding round led by Dragonfly.

Other investors participating in the round included Delphi Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Maven11 Capital, Nascent, Nomad Capital and OKX Ventures, MyShell said on Wednesday. Angel investors participating in the round included former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin, former Paradigm investment partner Casey Caruso, and former Parafi partner Santiago Santos.

MyShell began raising funding for the round in November and closed last month, CEO Ethan Sun told The Block. Like its seed round, MyShell’s pre-Series A funding round was also structured as shares with tokenized warrants, Sun said. He declined to comment on the latest assessment. MyShell was valued at $57 million when it raised $5.6 million in a seed funding round last October.

What is MyShell?

Launched last year, MyShell allows creators to create AI agents or bots that consumers or users can use. MyShell claims its platform has around 50,000 creators and over 1 million registered users. Its ecosystem includes bots like OpenVoice, an instant voice cloning program; MeloTTS, a multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) library; and Alice, an AI agent who performs various tasks, including topical research, coding, and literature review.

“The demand for personalized AI experiences has grown explosively over the last year, but currently most of these experiences are centralized with gatekeepers,” said Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly, in a press release. “MyShell uses cryptography and decentralization to put power over the AI ​​ecosystem back in the hands of users.”

MyShell currently offers points and plans to introduce token rewards for creators and consumers. “Points will be an important factor for a symbolic drop,” Sun said. After the token launch, MyShell creators will receive the token when their AI agents gain traction, and consumers will be able to stake tokens on AI agents to generate revenue, Sun added.

MyShell is currently multichain, using Polygon and opBNB. However, it plans to launch its own custom Layer 2 “soon this year,” according to Sun. “The general approach and idea is that we don’t want to commit to just one ecosystem, and as we have more creators and developers in our community, we will focus more on our custom L2,” he said. he declares.

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