MyShell, a Tokyo-based decentralized AI platform used to create “AI girlfriends,” has raised $11 million in pre-series A funding for its AI app-building ecosystem.
The funding, which brings MyShell’s complete funding to $16.6 million, was led by Dragonfly, with extra participation from Delphi Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Maven11 Capital, Nascent, Nomad Capital and OKX Ventures. The spherical additionally attracted help from particular person buyers reminiscent of crypto investor and thought chief Balaji Srinivasan, NEAR’s Illia Polosukhin and Paradigm’s Casey Ok. Caruso.
MyShell pitches itself as an ecosystem for AI creators to develop and deploy purposes. The brand new funds will likely be used to additional the event of its open-source foundational mannequin and to help its neighborhood “of over 1 million registered customers and 50,000 creators,” in line with a press release.
MyShell goals to differentiate itself from different AI platforms with its concentrate on decentralization: The corporate has open-sourced key elements of its codebase and leans on blockchain instruments to help with mannequin coaching and creator royalties.
Crypto will “uniquely allow” MyShell to “assist creators and AI mannequin researchers to monetize their work,” and blockchains will function the inspiration for “a devoted platform to commerce, and personal AI property,” MyShell CEO Ethan Solar advised CoinDesk in an e-mail.
The corporate’s important merchandise embrace “Workshop,” the place customers can construct AI brokers by prompts, and “Makerspace,” a no-code app growth device for creators. The instruments have primarily gained steam within the realm of AI companions, with folks using the platform to create Her-like chatbots designed to resemble particular characters, each actual and imagined.
“These AI purposes and fashions have the potential to ‘generate’ income, making them AI property that could possibly be tokenized, traded and owned to share ‘income stream,'” mentioned Solar.
MyShell offers an area for customers to showcase their creations in its Discord dialogue neighborhood, and many of the brokers shared there are typically AI girlfriends designed to appear to be cutesy anime characters – lots of which gate entry behind “not protected for work” content material warnings. Some have taken the device in a special path, nonetheless, utilizing MyShell to create AI bots mimicking figures like Elon Musk, the tech mogul; and Saul Goodman, the quick-witted lawyer-criminal from Breaking Unhealthy.
In response to Solar, “about 40% of content material created by the neighborhood is AI girlfriend/companion,” however “the principle objective of MyShell is to empower creators to construct personalized AI purposes in a diversified vary reasonably than simply specializing in AI companions.”
“Given the power of third-party API integrations and complete AI fashions to course of info, it’s now potential to construct purposes and productiveness instruments with out coding,” mentioned the MyShell CEO.
In its assertion on Tuesday, MyShell famous that along with constructing out its companion-creator neighborhood, the corporate’s tech has served as the inspiration for MeloTTS, “a pioneering open-source text-to-speech answer that intently mimics the human voice” and Allice, an “open-source basis mannequin for an AI-App growth workflow.”
