Vana, a startup focused on user-owned data networks, has successfully raised an additional $5 million in funding, bringing its total to $25 million. Coinbase Ventures led this latest funding round, reflecting the increasing interest in user-controlled data. Previously, Vana had also attracted investment from Paradigm, a prominent venture capital firm in the crypto space.
Vana Develops DAOs to Monetize User Data for AI
The startup is in the process of developing decentralized autonomous organizations that operate on the blockchain. These DAOs are designed to address the issue of inadequate training data for AI models while presenting a new opportunity for people using the Internet to earn money. Vana is among various organisations that are investing in the convergence of blockchain and AI.
Anna Kazlauskas, co-founder and CEO, noted that data from private sources, including social networks, is extremely important for AI. Using data from websites such as Reddit, LinkedIn, and X (formerly Twitter), Vana expects to assemble useful datasets that can be sold to the AI community.
Kazlauskas noted that public internet data has been mostly incorporated into the current AI architectures, while the abundance of private data from Facebook, Instagram, and other similar platforms remains pretty untapped. This presents a good chance for users to profit from their data.
Innovative DAO Model Paves Way for User Participation in AI
In April, Vana released its first DAO, which enables Reddit users to donate their platform history to a data warehouse for monetisation. Reddit informed some users that people with much ‘karma’ could earn between $300 and $400. It is the only fully functional DAO in Vana’s network now, and has 140,000 users as of now.
In the future, Vana aims to create more than a dozen DAOs. Kazlauskas assumed that this model would help people become interested in the changing AI environment. She also pointed out that it is more enticing to give users a stake in an AI model or a dataset than to buy data outright for money, which reveals a growing trend of users being included in data ownership.
