Traditional online platforms often collect and monetise user data without explicit consent, leading to concerns over privacy and control. With the mission to empower individuals by allowing them to own and monetise their digital identities, Silicon Valley-based AI Web3 startup Bluwhale addresses the challenge of user data ownership and privacy in the digital landscape and has surpassed $100 million in funding, combining its Seed/Series A rounds.
This investment is split into $7 million in venture funding, $85 million token purchase commitment, and $8 million in grants and node sales proceeds.
A large number of investors have participated in Bluwhale’s new funding. Some of the investors and partners joining the round include Cointelegraph, SwissBorg, Awaken Finance, CoinBureau, Altcoin Daily, Master Ventures, DWF Labs, Baboon Ventures, Cryptonite Capital, Hub71, NewTribe Capital, Vitality Ventures, Citizen Capital, Castrum Capital, Elevate Ventures, Common Wealth Fund, AlphaCrypto Capital, Faro, Kahuna, Moon Capital, EVO and London Real Ventures, with additional funding support from Arbitrum and Movement Labs.
The investments will allow the company to further expand its Web3 intelligence layer across multiple L1 and L2 blockchains.
“Awaken Foundation is proud to back the Bluwhale team in their mission to empower individuals to transform their data and mobile into an asset class. Their innovative work aligns perfectly with our commitment to investing in bold, forward-thinking teams driving AI-powered transformative technologies within the broader Web3 ecosystem,” said Nattaphol Vimolchalao, Director at Awaken Finance.
Kiet Fong, Gaming Partnership APAC at OffChain Labs (Contributor to Arbitrum), said, “Bluwhale’s AI Layer simplifies complexity of blockchains by making it as easy as plug-n-play for AI agents and as simple as having a friendly chat with the chain for retail users.”
How was the idea born?
Bluwhale was founded in 2022 by Stanford and Berkeley’s machine learning experts and former TikTok AI veterans – Adam Rowell and Han Jin.
Han Jin, co-founder of Bluwhale told TFN: “Over the past decade, my co-founder and I have focused on building AI companies in the Web2 space, with a specialisation in developing data and personalisation infrastructure for large enterprises. Our work has primarily revolved around user profiling, insights, and behaviour analysis. My experience at my previous company showed me just how much user data was concentrated in the hands of the top 2% of companies, creating a monopoly that hindered competition and the future advancement of AI.”
He continued: “We realised that as consumers increasingly transact on-chain, their data would also naturally reside there. This presented an opportunity to build AI infrastructure similar to what we had created before—only this time, with a focus on blockchain. We saw the blockchain as a game-changer for individuals, giving them the ability to take control of their personal data, monetise it, and benefit directly. That’s how Bluwhale was born. Bluwhale is transforming AI on the blockchain by leveraging it to connect users on-chain for targeted messaging and advertising. Our mission is to democratise AI capabilities for smaller businesses while empowering individuals to securely monetise their data on the blockchain. This not only shifts power back to the users but also rewards them for it.”
Transforming AI in Web3
While L1/L2s serve as the fundamental infrastructure for Web3 when it comes to transactions, consensus, data, and storage, among others, an AI-specific L3 with zk provides aggregation, contextualisation, and privacy to the computing environment on which AI agents and models can train and infer.
Bluwhale is uniquely positioned to decentralise AI, as its layer is powered by nodes that individuals can run on mobile devices to contribute verification and data, as well as provide storage and computing resources to the layer in the future.
The company is pairing up with Caldera to build Oceanum, an L3 zk-roll up that supports AI application scaling across several L1/L2s. The custom zk-layer will be initially built out on Arbitrum to decentralise AI workloads, with an environment optimised for privacy, speed, and cost-efficiency such that AI agents can easily leverage the underlying data, storage, and computing resources in the future.
“To decentralise AI on-chain, data, storage, and computation must exist on a single aggregation layer, allowing different parties to consume and contribute most securely and safely possible. Bluwhale and team deeply understand this challenge, so we’re eager and thrilled to partner with them,” said Matt Katz, CEO of Caldera.
Decentralised AI powered by users
Bluwhale’s unique approach allows individuals to run verification and data nodes on mobile devices, contributing storage and computing resources. This decentralised structure empowers users to exchange their contributions for monetary value, turning mobile devices and digital footprints into valuable assets.
