Crunch Lab, the core contributor behind CrunchDAO, raised $5 million in a strategic funding round to advance its decentralized artificial intelligence predictions network, a system credited with contributing to cancer research breakthroughs at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The new round of capital brings the protocol’s total funding to $10 million, which will be used to build an institutional “intelligence layer” for decentralized AI, the company said in a Tuesday announcement shared with Cointelegraph.
The round was co-led by Galaxy Ventures and Road Capital, with participation from VanEck and Multicoin, which occurred in June.
Crunch Lab aims to transform enterprise forecasting challenges into “encrypted modeling competitions,” rewarding participants who create the most accurate predictive models.
“When thousands of practitioners compete, you uncover solutions even the best internal teams miss,” Jean Herelle, co-founder and CEO of Crunch Lab, told Cointelegraph. “Instead of competing for scarce talent, we give enterprises secure access to all of it through a decentralized network.”
Funding to drive decentralized AI innovation
Crunch Lab’s approach uses blockchain-based incentives to “decentralize” the process of building AI intelligence by allowing data scientists to compete anonymously while preserving data privacy.
The new decentralized AI network may serve as an “intelligence layer for global enterprises,” according to Will Nuelle, general partner at Galaxy.
“Whether predicting asset prices, optimizing energy demand, or advancing healthcare diagnostics, CrunchDAO’s crowdsourced models unlock smarter, faster decision-making,” he added.
The network plans to use the funding to expand into real-world industries beyond finance and biomedical research.
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Crunch Lab’s AI drives real-world breakthroughs
Crunch Labs’ crowdsourced AI solution is already delivering significant results for leading global institutions, including the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, which achieved breakthrough results in cancer gene research therapy using its computer vision.
“Crunch’s network is already being used in real research,” said Herelle. “The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center used it to train better computer vision models for detecting cancer from cell images.”
Herelle added that Nobel Prize-winning economist Guido Imbens used Crunch Lab’s platform to build one of the first algorithms capable of uncovering causal relationships between economic variables.
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It also delivered “double-digit accuracy improvements” for the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) Research Lab, which is the research arm of one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, managing over $1 trillion.
CrunchDAO was also selected for the Solana Incubator’s second cohort in early 2025, which aimed to support projects driving the mainstream adoption of the Solana network.
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