Prime Intellect, a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure startup, has closed a $130M Series A funding round led by Radical Ventures, putting the company’s valuation at $1B. For a company that’s barely two years old, that’s a remarkable trajectory, and one that sits squarely at the intersection of two narratives crypto investors care deeply about: decentralized compute and the AI arms race.
The round drew participation from NVIDIA Ventures, Intel Capital, and Dell Technologies Capital.
From crypto seed to billion-dollar valuation
The company raised a $5.5M seed round in April 2024, co-led by CoinFund and Distributed Global, two firms with deep roots in the crypto ecosystem. Prime Intellect’s core architecture, a peer-to-peer GPU compute marketplace with distributed reinforcement learning infrastructure, reads like a DePIN project dressed in enterprise clothing.
Then came a $15M round in February 2025 led by Founders Fund, the Peter Thiel-backed venture firm. That round featured Andrej Karpathy, the former Tesla AI director and OpenAI co-founder, among its angel investors.
