Back to Blog
NewsAugust 19, 2025

DAiFi Raises $20M Seed Round to Build the World’s First Verifiable Intelligence Network

Big milestone for decentralized AI: DAiFi has officially raised $20 million in seed funding to accelerate development of its Proof-of-Compute blockchain and Verifiable Intelligence Fabric.

The round was backed by a mix of early-stage Web3 funds, AI infrastructure investors, and several prominent angel operators from the distributed systems and machine learning communities.


At the center of it all is Angelo Estrada, DAiFi’s founder and CEO, who says the goal isn’t just to build another blockchain — but to create an entirely new economic layer for artificial intelligence.

“AI is becoming the most important productive force on the internet, but today it runs inside black boxes owned by a handful of companies,” Estrada said. “We’re building the infrastructure where intelligence itself becomes verifiable, tradable, and permissionless.”

Who Backed the Round

The seed round drew participation from top Web3 and crypto-native investors, including:

  • Delphi Digital — one of the most active early-stage tech investors globally and a leader in Web3 infrastructure.

  • SL2 Capital — the investment arm of the major U.S. crypto exchange, focused on foundational blockchain technologies.

  • Inclusion Capital — builder of the crypto ecosystem with a portfolio spanning infrastructure and decentralized networks.

  • Choronos Ventures — veteran crypto investor backing innovative blockchain projects.

  • Everse Capital — a prominent Web3 fund known for early bets on decentralized infrastructure.

  • Lightshift — active in funding emerging blockchain and AI infrastructure companies.

Additional strategic angel investors from the AI + blockchain community also participated, giving DAiFi both capital and ecosystem support as it prepares for mainnet deployment.

Why This Matters

Demand for high-performance AI compute continues to skyrocket — but most global capacity is concentrated in centralized cloud providers. DAiFi’s vision is to unlock idle GPUs and edge accelerators around the world, enabling:

  • Decentralized compute markets where buyers and sellers interact permissionlessly

  • Cryptographically verifiable AI outputs using zero-knowledge proofs

  • Secure consensus anchored in useful AI work instead of wasted energy

Estrada elaborated on the mission:

“We’re building infrastructure that treats AI outputs as first-class assets — assets that are verifiable, traceable, and composable. This isn’t just about faster compute; it’s about trust in intelligence.”

From Compute Scarcity to Compute Markets

DAiFi is developing a decentralized network where users can buy and sell AI computation the same way people trade digital assets. Instead of relying on centralized cloud providers, DAiFi enables a global mesh of GPUs and accelerators to perform AI workloads — with cryptographic proofs that the work was actually done.

That’s where its Verifiable Intelligence Fabric (VIF) comes in: every inference, simulation, or model run produces a zero-knowledge proof, turning raw computation into a provable digital asset.

“We don’t just want to decentralize servers,” Estrada explained. “We want to decentralize trust in intelligence itself. If an AI generates an output on DAiFi, you can verify it mathematically — not just take someone’s word for it.”

Why Investors Are Paying Attention

The funding comes as global demand for AI compute continues to surge, while access to high-performance hardware remains concentrated and expensive.

DAiFi’s pitch to investors is simple but ambitious:

  • Turn idle global hardware into an open compute marketplace

  • Make AI outputs cryptographically verifiable

  • Tie network security directly to useful AI work via Proof-of-Compute

That combination positions DAiFi at the intersection of AI infrastructure, crypto economics, and verifiable computation — three areas investors see as foundational to the next wave of internet infrastructure.

One investor in the round described DAiFi as:

“What DeFi did for capital, DAiFi aims to do for intelligence — unlock it, price it, and make it programmable.”

What the $20M Will Fund

According to Estrada, the seed capital will be used to push DAiFi from research into live network deployment.

Key focus areas include:

Verifiable AI Infrastructure

Expanding the zk-proof systems that allow AI computations to be validated without exposing proprietary models or user data.

Global Compute Mesh

Onboarding GPU providers across consumer, enterprise, and edge environments to grow the decentralized execution layer.

Proof-of-Compute Mainnet

Launching DAiFi’s Layer-1 blockchain, where consensus is driven by verified AI workloads instead of energy-intensive hashing.

Developer Ecosystem

Building SDKs and tooling so developers can plug decentralized, verifiable AI directly into apps, agents, and autonomous systems.

A Bigger Vision: Intelligence as a Liquid Asset

For Estrada, this raise is just the beginning of a much larger shift.

“We believe compute is becoming a commodity, but intelligence is becoming an asset class,” he said. “DAiFi is the marketplace, the settlement layer, and the verification engine for that new economy.”

In other words, DAiFi isn’t just trying to decentralize infrastructure — it’s trying to make AI outputs themselves ownable, tradable, and composable across the internet.

If the team delivers, the result could be a future where:

  • AI agents pay other AI agents for verified work

  • Model outputs become reusable on-chain assets

  • Trust in AI comes from math, not corporations

And with $20 million in fresh backing, DAiFi now has the runway to try to make that future real.