Blockchain startup Fetch.ai grabs $40M to provide monetization and other tooling for AI-generated information

AI is riding high on a curve of hype, which means some of the practical questions that might grow louder over time -- the many costs (financial and social), the business models -- may not be the most front of mind right now. Today a startup called Fetch.ai is announcing $40 million in funding in anticipation of when that shifts.

The startup, based out of Cambridge, England, says it is building tooling that focuses on "autonomous agents, network infrastructure, and decentralised machine learning" that help enable communication and actions between AI applications, the idea being to make the work produced by them more actionable.

CEO Humayun Sheikh said in an interview that he also believes there is a role for Fetch.ai to play in the creation of learning models, providing a more equitable and traceable approach to AI by way of distributed ledgers for entities to feed data into those models.

Up to now, a large part of the work Fetch has been doing has been in the area of IP and technology development (it already has a number of patent applications and patents issued in the U.S. and Europe).

But there are also some aspects of Fetch.ai's platform already live -- Fetch.ai is built on blockchain technology and it has created a FET token that will be used on its platform. Earlier this week, it launched a "Notyphi" notification feature for using in connection with the Fetch wallet. But these are just parts of what looks like a very ambitious roadmap. Sheikh said the capital it's announcing today will be invested in that work as Fetch gears up to launch commercial services later this year.

The funding is a substantial amount in the current market, and it is coming from a single company, DWF Labs, an incubator that is connected to an entity called Digital Wave Finance. The latter company is described by DWF Labs as a "top 5 trading entity by volume in cryptocurrency," although, ironically, I have been unable to find any trace of it on the internet and a spokesperson also was unable to provide me with any online links.