Pramod Viswanath, the Forrest G. Hamrick Professor in Engineering at Princeton, never imagined that an email sent to a handful of colleagues and students would result in an $85 million seed round.
The email, sent in early 2024, described a vision for an artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem that was not just open but also a financially sustainable solution for inclusive AI development. This idea became Sentient, an AI foundation that is seeking to change the way AI is developed, distributed, and owned.
“I pitched it to everybody, even professors on campus, whoever comes into my orbit,” Viswanath told The Daily Princetonian. “In AI, you need more leverage to do real things. And Sentient began.”
Co-founded by Viswanath alongside Himanshu Tyagi, Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science, and Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of blockchain platform Polygon, Sentient’s mission is to decentralize AI development by empowering communities to build outside the control of a handful of dominant tech corporations.
The current, familiar AI ecosystem is mostly made up of “closed” models like ChatGPT and Gemini. A system being “closed” means that as the user, one cannot edit the model’s training data, weights, or behavioral rules. The intellectual property and underlying algorithms remain with the model’s creator, and users simply interact with the AI system through a web portal or app
On the other end of the spectrum are “open” models, like Llama and some versions of DeepSeek. As the user, one can freely download and edit the model, but the creators of the model do not retain ownership or earn profits from its use.
However, the common thread between all of these models is that they are owned by tech giants like OpenAI, Google, and Meta.
“[AI] is controlled by five to six corporations — it should not [be],” said Vivek Kolli ’24, Sentient’s Chief of Staff.
Sentient, on the other hand, aims to build a transparent and decentralized AI platform that combines the benefits of both open and closed systems. In their vision, users can download and edit models, but creators and contributors can also retain ownership and can monetize the use of their models.
“We think that putting [AI] in the hands of the people will result in a much better product than allowing five to six corporations to control it,” Kolli said. “The people should have the major control of the most powerful technology ever.”
The core technology behind Sentient is a cryptographic standard they call OML, which stands for Open, Monetizable, and Loyal. This is what allows developers to share access to their models (open) while being paid for that use (monetizable) and retaining control over how models are edited (loyal).
“OML is a cryptographic format that lets you, as an inventor, give away AI, but the user has to pay you and follow the principles that you set out,” Viswanath said.
To track and verify models’ use across platforms, Sentient uses “fingerprinting,” a method of integrating undetectable, tamper-proof “fingerprints” into AI models that allow them to be uniquely identified. This allows developers to ensure that they are properly compensated.
Antonio Knez ’23, Sentient’s Growth Manager, commented on the state of AI development: “This incentive system in AI is broken.”
According to Knez, AI research in the past has lived in the public domain, driven by academic papers and open collaboration. But in recent years, companies like OpenAI (with GPT-4) and Google (with Bard) have taken that freely shared knowledge, wrapped it up in proprietary APIs, and monetized it without rewarding the researchers who laid the groundwork.
In contrast with these companies’ closed or non-loyal systems, Sentient’s approach ensures that anyone whose data, code, or ideas improve a model actually earns a stake in its success.
Knez noted that “[Sentient’s] models can be tokenized, and you can distribute ownership based on contributions. So, if I publish a model and you improve it, you get equity in the resulting model.”
In February, Sentient released its flagship commercial offering Sentient Chat, a consumer AI platform designed to be a centralized hub for AI services. Its functionality is similar to other AI chatbots like ChatGPT, but with an additional emphasis on integrating real-time data and fostering a community of developers.
“As a builder, you get instant distribution with Sentient Chat,” Kolli said, referring to the platform’s ability to connect developers with a wide user base. According to Kolli, over 1.8 million users joined the waitlist to use the product within its first week.
Developers can apply to integrate their AI agents into Sentient Chat by building a model and submitting it for approval. Once the agent passes reliability testing and complies with the platform’s terms of service, it becomes accessible to all users. Developers cannot immediately publish their agents because each submission goes through a review process that helps maintain quality and prevent low-effort content.
One core element of Sentient is the Builder Program, an initiative designed to support companies and individual developers in building AI products, offering credits for computing resources, product and engineering mentorship, and potential grants for promising projects. So far, it has committed over a million dollars to support builders, from university students to experienced engineers looking to create something innovative.
Most recently at Princeton, Sentient hosted a “passive income” hackathon on April 5. Teams of students competed to build passive income streams powered by AI, with prizes of up to $2,000 for first place, $1,000 for second, and $500 for third.
Teams were given one day to build a passive income stream powered by AI. Once the teams finished building, each team’s system ran for three weeks, with the goal of accumulating the most views and profit.
The hackathon, held at Frist Campus Center, had over 30 participants and eight teams. The winning team consisted of Imanuel Udofia ’28, Herish Tripathi ’28, and Griffin Hon ’28. The three are roommates in Mathey College and are all on the Bachelor of Science in Engineering (B.S.E.) track. Hon is majoring in Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE), Triphathi in Computer Science, and Udofia in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
“We saw this opportunity where you could use AI to make money,” Hon said. “We thought we might be able to leverage our understanding of social media, combined with [Tripathi’s] expertise in coding and his understanding of AI, to make a product that could do really well.”
Hon is a contributing Data writer for the ‘Prince.’
The students built an AI-driven video-generation platform for the higher-education market. By training modular scripts and machine-learning models on current slang and popular formats, their platform can automatically churn out hundreds of short, college-focused videos.
Their product now sells to startups and admissions-consulting firms at over $100 per video. The group also has an Instagram account called “academicindex” where they produce relatable, student-focused content.
“I think one of the integral parts of our success was actually using [Sentient’s] AI, which is trained for humor, to mass-generate comedic ideas,” Hon said.
Before Sentient can scale its community of builders into long-term partners, it uses events like hackathons to find rising talent.
“The goal is to get this talent that we then support, get them to a seed stage, and then they become a full-fledged ecosystem partner,” Knez said.
This model of empowering builders reflects Sentient’s broader belief about how intelligence itself should evolve.
“Our thesis is that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will come through a collection of individual intelligences,” Kolli said. “We have multiple models, multiple agents, and all of the backend. With the collection of these individual intelligences, they combine into something much stronger than the generalized products that ChatGPT or Perplexity gives you.”
Sentient’s impact is not limited to hackathons and university partnerships. Sentient Chat allows developers to integrate their models and products, and Knez said that they are “partnering with 120 partners at the moment across data stack, compute agents, and model builders.”
Sentient recently raised $85 million seed round on a $1.2 billion evaluation. The seed round fundraising was co-led by Founders Fund (a venture capital firm led by Peter Thiel), Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures.
“85 million sounds like a lot, but … if you want to be a distribution channel, it’s nothing,” Viswanath said, emphasizing the need for more funding in the future.
“The vision is very big, but that’s the reason why we raised such an evaluation, because we’re not solving a problem that could easily be solved,” Kolli said. “We’re solving a problem that I think people don’t even see as a problem right now, and we’ll only see it as a problem once it comes.”
The problem that Kolli is referring to is the dominance of “closed” AI systems controlled by a few large companies. This current model is financially backed by some of the biggest companies in tech, but Sentient is trying to create a different, financially viable model for collaborative and transparent AI: OML ensures that models are open but traceable, allowing developers to maintain control over and be paid for their work.
“If we can solve this through alignment, we can start building incentive and coordination systems to coordinate millions of developers around the world,” Knez said. “In terms of day to day, it’s just about meeting with every possible project in crypto, in AI and beyond, and seeing how we can work with them.”
Kolli further underscored the community aspect of the organization. “We want every builder to be on Sentient Chat, whether they’re making models, agents, or MCPs. We want to foster this AI ecosystem, which isn’t being built right now, especially one that rewards everyone for the work that they do.”
Looking to the future, Sentient has ambitious plans to expand its suite of products and services. “We want to be building our own models. We want to be building and improving, and we want to be the ones who can claim that when AGI comes, we’re the ones who can mediate it in such a way that it's safe and aligned to the interests of the people,” Golev said.
Aside from Knez, Golev, and Kolli, there are other Princeton students and alumni involved with Sentient: Edoardo Contente ’24, Lucas Irwin ’23, Chiara von Gerlach ’24, and Roko Pozaric ’25.
As Kolli reflected on his decision to join Sentient, he pointed to a broader trend among students choosing familiar career paths over riskier ventures.
“I feel like a lot of Princeton people subconsciously get pushed into finance or banking because that's what everyone else around them is doing,” Kolli reflected. He posed Sentient as a mission-driven alternative.
“I want people to know we are working on a huge problem. If people want to work on something that they really believe and will really find fulfilling work, this is the place to do it.”
Hayk Yengibaryan is an associate News editor, senior Sports writer, and education director for the ‘Prince.’
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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