Prime Intellect, a startup focused on developing a peer-to-peer compute and intelligence protocol, has successfully raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Founders Fund. The round also saw participation from Menlo Ventures, Coinfund, which co-led the seed round, and several notable angel investors including Andrej Karpathy, Clément Delangue, Tri Dao, Dylan Patel, Balaji Srinivasan, and Emad Mustak. The company aims to address the bottleneck in AI development by providing a distributed training and inference platform. Prime Intellect has already demonstrated its capabilities by training a 10 billion parameter model across three continents and is working on scaling this to state-of-the-art (SoTA) level models. The vision is to make AI production more open, accessible, and scalable through decentralized networks. Investors and industry observers have expressed strong support for Prime Intellect's approach, highlighting the significance of decentralized training as a critical component for the future of AI. Some have noted that while Prime Intellect has the potential to become a top western AI lab, its Chinese counterparts at similar stages typically raise significantly more funding.