As artificial intelligence continues to dominate corporate attention and venture capital investment, the once-beloved blockchain sector sometimes feels like a neglected child. Yet many crypto advocates argue that blockchain can still solve AI’s most pressing problems, from identity confirmation to preventing deepfakes. That’s why one startup, Space and Time, is developing software to bring blockchain’s immutability to AI applications. It will have ample resources to realize its vision, with a $20 million Series A led by crypto-focused venture capital firms Framework Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, Arrington Capital and Hivemind Capital.
Space and Time had previously raised $20 million from Microsoft’s M12 Ventures, which also participated in the Series A, in September 2022.
“We’re moving toward an AI-powered world, which means you don’t know what’s being generated by AI and what’s being generated by a person or a company,” said Nate Holiday, co-founder and CEO of Space and Time., said Fortune in an interview. “We think it’s incredibly important to be at the heart of that process to ensure that when applications are built in this new world, powered by space and time, you have that verifiability, that trust, and that transparency.”
AI x blockchain
Space and Time’s pitch is simple, at least in technological terms. The promise of cryptocurrencies is that data can be encoded directly on blockchains without the need for intermediaries, meaning it can’t be tampered with or misinterpreted, as long as you know how to interact with it and what to look for. When you send a transaction from one Bitcoin wallet holder to another, there’s no need for a bank or broker to be in the middle and distort what happened.
AI is, in many cases, the exact opposite. The applications we are used to, like ChatGPT, are black boxes: we ask them a question and get a result, but we have almost no idea what the process is and we have no way of knowing. This means that when the answer is incorrect, there is no way to understand how the agent came up with the potential solution.
Space and Time is tackling this thorny problem of verifiability. Its technology aims to ensure that when an AI application produces a result, you can confirm its provenance and, ideally, that it is correct. Holiday argues that the way to do this is through blockchain, which is really just a type of database that is theoretically more immune to human interference.
Space and Time initially pitched its solution only to blockchain companies, positioning itself as a sort of decentralized version of data storage service Snowflake. In other words, it would serve as a data warehouse, but unlike other crypto-native solutions like Filecoin, Space and Time would be designed to allow applications to quickly retrieve and access data. This plan has proven attractive to companies operating in the world of DeFi, which revolves around financial platforms that need to store massive amounts of user information that require constant updates, such as lending apps.
Michael Anderson, co-founder of Framework Ventures, said the Web3 Snowflake analogy was what initially drew him to Space and Time, as he realized the use cases could be expanded. He said the idea now is to take the benefits of blockchain verifiability and apply it to non-blockchain applications, such as traditional financial institutions, which can use blockchain-native tools (namely ZK proofs) to cross-reference third-party data, such as personally identifiable information (PII). For example, if banks and DMVs were integrated with Snowflake, Space and Time could help banks use DMV data to verify a person’s age without having to store the data themselves.
AI is the next frontier. As AI agents start to perform tasks for us on the internet, like booking flights, they will need to be able to programmatically perform transactions with rules around credit card usage or verifying data accuracy. In this future world, Space and Time wants to be the blockchain’s native database that new applications and the AI agents that interact with them will rely on.
Of course, with crypto and AI still in their infancy, there’s still a long way to go before this type of technology is widely adopted. Still, Space and Time is making enough progress to attract investment from some of the top blockchain venture capital funds, as well as Microsoft, which aims to compete with other hyperscalers like Google and Amazon. In addition to its database solutions, Space and Time is also leveraging Microsoft’s generative AI products to create blockchain application development tools for its customers.
“(Space and Time) has real people building real technology, which is particularly hard to find in the blockchain x AI space,” Anderson said. “When you see entrepreneurs like that coming in, it gets you excited about blockchain.”
