What’s the pitch?
Sapien's Story
Sapien is a Web3 protocol founded in 2023 built to service the future of AI via their innovative data-labeling platform. The company is co-founded by CEO Rowan Stone, former co-creator of Coinbase's L2 Base, and Trevor Koverko, founder of Polymath, former NHL player and author of the ERC1400 token standard. The protocol has raised $10.5M in seed funding led by variant, with participation from Primitive Ventures, Animoca, Yield Guild games, and angel investors including YGG founder Gabby Dizon and SoftBank Vision Fund alum Kevin Jiang.
Sapien's mission is to democratize AI development by connecting major enterprises with a global workforce of over 100,000 AI workers across 70+ countries who provide expert data labeling services for everything from autonomous driving systems to medical imaging, using blockchain incentives and gamification to ensure high-quality output and fair compensation.
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Ecosystem
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Beluga’s Take
The AI industry has been the talk of the town for the tech world, reaching over $250B in private investments in 2024 alone. AI within crypto has been a different story however, as the sector has been filled with countless copycats of decentralized GPU farming and rudimentary chat bots. Enter Sapien, a decentralized data foundry which has generated real demand from non-crypto enterprises for their product.
Speaking of enterprises, Sapien has already onboarded 17 companies including Alibaba, Baidu, Toyota, Lenovo and Amazon to solve their data bottleneck. Their growing list of clients also means a growing opportunity for remote AI workers to earn more, creating an ecosystem where workers are directly rewarded by the companies using their services.
As opposed to most crypto companies which struggle to onboard meaningful users at all, Sapien is hitting the market with both a thriving userbase and client pipeline. We believe most of the market isn't paying attention close enough to this one, especially given their recent announcement that Lucy Guo, co-founder of Scale AI, has stepped on as an official advisor. Given Rowan's history with Coinbase, we also think it's likely Sapien sees top tier exchange listings from day one.
What Sapien does
Fine-Tune LLMs with Expert Human Feedback
High-quality training data and data collection is essential for all large language models, whether you build the data yourself, use a dataset from Sapien, or pre-existing models. A human-in-the-loop labeling process delivers real-time feedback for fine-tuning datasets to build the most performant and differentiated AI models.
Q3 2025
Estimated Token Release date
Sapien's token is expected to launch in Q3, but this may be subject to change.
Disclaimer: Beluga has a marketing partnership with Sapien