Pantera Leads $20M Openmind Funding Round

The crypto venture capital firm says Openmind’s focus on using decentralization to address the so-called “missing layer” problem in robotics could be a game-changer.

$20M Boost: Pantera Leads Investment in Openmind

Dan Morehead’s Pantera Capital quietly announced a $20 million funding round for AI software startup Openmind on Monday, touting its open-source software products as the “missing layer” in the multi-billion-dollar robotics industry. Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group (DCG), and others also participated in the round.

Morehead launched Pantera in 2003. The firm created one of the first crypto venture funds in 2013, soon after the Ethereum whitepaper was published. Openmind was founded by Stanford University Bioengineering professor Jan Liphardt. His firm has produced two key software products, OM1 and Fabric. The former is a robotics operating system and the latter is an open-source protocol that allows robots from different manufacturers to share information.

The firm’s thesis is that robotics is a heavily siloed ecosystem with machines that lack interoperability and can’t easily share knowledge. Those limitations, according to Openmind, severely impede innovation. Pantera, on its blog, explains that it invested in Liphardt’s startup because decentralized open-source software such as OM1 and Fabric represents a “missing layer” that will revolutionize robotics by allowing different machines to collaborate.

“If we want intelligent machines operating in open environments, we need an open intelligence network,” said Pantera Partner Nihal Maunder. “Openmind is doing for robotics what Linux and Ethereum did for software.”