Crunch Lab Raises $5M to Build the Intelligence Layer for Decentralized AI

The AI industry has a talent problem. Building world-class predictive models traditionally requires assembling elite teams, a process that costs upwards of $100 million and takes years. But what if you could tap into the collective intelligence of 10,000+ machine learning engineers instead?

Today, we're announcing that Crunch Lab has raised $5 million in a strategic funding round co-led by Galaxy Ventures and Road Capital, with participation from VanEck and Multicoin Capital. This brings our total funding to $10 million and validates a fundamentally different approach to AI: one that's decentralized, meritocratic, and already delivering measurable results in production.

Why This Matters

The demand for high-quality predictions spans from finance to healthcare to energy. Yet the traditional model of building in-house AI teams faces critical bottlenecks:

Hiring constraints

Competition for top ML talent is fierce and expensive

Siloed thinking

Even the best teams can miss solutions that lie outside their approach

Scalability limits

Growing prediction capabilities means growing headcount linearly

To tackle these, we've built a decentralized network that gives enterprises secure access to all of it through structured modeling challenges called Crunches.

Proven in Production

Our crowdsourced approach is driving real breakthroughs for world-class institutions:

ADIA Lab

17% improvement in cross-sectional asset pricing predictions

Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

Breakthrough results in cancer gene research using computer vision

Global Investment Banks

Live deployment of Mid+One™, our crowdsourced mid-market pricing engine

When you transform enterprise problems into encrypted modeling challenges and let thousands of practitioners compete, you uncover solutions even the best internal teams miss.

The Collective Intelligence Advantage

The power of CrunchDAO lies in three core principles:

Diversity Beats Homogeneity

While single teams often get stuck in particular approaches, our network of independent participants brings multiple perspectives to every problem. Individual limitations offset each other, revealing solutions no single methodology would find.

Dynamic Adaptation

Our decentralized network continuously evolves. When prediction errors occur, different participants independently work to find better approaches resulting in creating a system that naturally adapts and improves without asking permission.

Meritocratic Performance

Contributors compete purely on results. Rewards flow to those who deliver the best models, ensuring continuous improvement and maintaining motivation across the network.

Strategic Backing for the Next Phase

Our investors understand that Crunch is the infrastructure for a new paradigm:

"Crunch Lab is building an intelligence layer for global enterprises. Whether predicting asset prices, optimizing energy demand, or advancing healthcare diagnostics, CrunchDAO's crowdsourced models unlock smarter, faster decision-making."

— Will Nuelle, General Partner at Galaxy Ventures

"We believe Crunch Lab represents one of the most compelling attempts to connect global quants with enterprises at scale. AI is a trillion-dollar market, and open protocols like Crunch are positioned to capture it."

— Thomas Bailey, Road Capital

What's Next

This funding accelerates our mission on multiple fronts:

Platform

Enhancing our protocol infrastructure, security features, and developer tools.

Industry Expansion

Moving beyond finance and biomedical research into energy, logistics, retail, and more

Ecosystem Growth

Building out partnerships and integrations as evidenced by our selection for the
Solana Incubator's second cohort

The Protocol That Powers It All

At the heart of Crunch Lab is CrunchDAO, our decentralized protocol. It connects over 10,000 data scientists and AI engineers worldwide, including 1,200+ PhDs, through structured challenges that consistently outperform traditional in-house approaches.

The protocol handles everything from secure model submission to privacy-preserving data transformation to automated reward distribution while protecting both contributor IP and enterprise data. It's infrastructure designed for collective intelligence at scale.

Join the Revolution

The era of hiring bottlenecks and siloed AI teams is ending. The future belongs to collective networks that can harness global talent, adapt continuously, and deliver results that single teams simply cannot match.

As our CEO Jean Herelle puts it: "When thousands of practitioners compete, you uncover solutions even the best internal teams miss."

We're building the intelligence layer for the next generation of enterprise AI. And we're just getting started.

Crunch Lab Raises $5M to Build the Intelligence Layer for Decentralized AI

Why This Matters

Proven in Production

The Collective Intelligence Advantage

Strategic Backing for the Next Phase

What's Next

The Protocol That Powers It All

Join the Revolution

Build together

Construire ensemble

Bygge sammen,

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