Alethea AI raises $16M in private token sale for intelligent NFTs for the metaverse

Alethea AI, creator of the “intelligent NFTs,” or iNFTs, has raised $16 million in a private and restricted token sale to a group of game and crypto investors.

The company is creating what it considers to be the underlying AI infrastructure for iNTFs, or intelligent nonfungible tokens, on the path to the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One.

Alethea is building scalable AI infrastructure for NFTs, enabling NFTs to be animated, interactive, and intelligent through Open AI Foundation’s GPT-3 technology, which is a learning AI that shapes natural language responses to queries.

Alethea AI sold tokens to lead purchasers Metapurse and Crypto.com Capital. Other strategic purchasers in the token sale included Multicoin, Alameda, Mark Cuban, Bitkraft, Dapper Labs, Galaxy Interactive, Sfermion, LD Capital, Hof Capital, Gemini Frontier Fund, IDEO CoLab, Defiance, Whitestar Capital, IOSG, Nascent, Borderless Capital, CMS Holdings, and others.

The sale also attracted strategic operators like Sandeep Nailwal, DeFi Dad, Andrew Steinwold, Meltem De Mirrors, Sid Jain, Haseeb Qureshi, Ravindra Kumar, Gabby Dizon, Jeff Morris Jr, Mike Dudas, DCInvestor, Gmoney NFT, and Bitscale.

“There is a cambrian explosion in innovation and creativity happening in the NFT space, with [avatar communities] launching at a scale and speed we never thought possible,” said Arif Khan, CEO of Alethea AI, in an email with GamesBeat. “Whether it is Penguins or Bored Apes, new intellectual property is being created from the bottom-up, without the involvement of major corporate studios or large budgets. Creators and communities will soon demand to do more with their NFTs creating meaningfully rich, free-flowing and interactive consumer experiences built on a crypto-native stack, and we’ll be making that possible through the Alethea AI protocol.”

Above: NFTs are on the rise.

Image Credit: Cryptoslam

This announcement follows Alethea’s recently successful auction of the most technically advanced non-fungible token (NFT) made to date, known as an intelligent NFT (iNFT). The iNFT sold for a record-breaking $478,000 through Sotheby’s Natively Digital on June 10, 2021.

The Alethea team has been working closely with the Open AI team, helping to test and refine Open AI’s technology as Alethea AI was one of the earliest teams to gain access to its GPT-3 API released last summer.

Alethea AI will serve as the connective tissue by upgrading NFTs to become interactive, intelligent assets that grow in value over time, as their intelligence evolves, Khan said. Today most NFT native projects are static images, and with Alethea’s protocol, these static images can be brought to life, creating richer more meaningful engagements for brands and creators, he said.

Alethea believes that NFTs will provide a definitive property rights infrastructure for the emerging metaverse driven by interactive and intelligent avatars. The AI infrastructure built by Alethea will serve as the underlying connective tissue to enable NFTs to “come alive” as interactive media assets, with personality traits, preferences, and real-time interactive capability.

More recently, Alethea demonstrated its real-time interactive technology with a collaboration with the Avastars and Stoner Cats Community by demonstrating a live conversation between Jimmy McNelis and two avastars and DeFi Dad conversing with a Stoner Cat.

Regarding the token sale, Khan said, “We are a blockchain native organization building a protocol at the intersection of NFTs and AI, and a large part of our philosophy is the progressive decentralization of our network and protocol. Like Ethereum and other public decentralized protocols, our network’s infrastructure is currently supported by institutional partners, who are token holders and users who have access to our services and protocol. The Alethea Token gives access to our protocol and provides our partners and institutions with consumptive use of the services it provides.”