As AI continues to capture corporate attention—and venture capital investment—the once-popular blockchain sector sometimes feels like a spurned child. Yet many crypto advocates argue that blockchain can still solve the most pressing problems AI poses, from confirming personhood to preventing deepfakes. That’s why one startup, Space and Time, is developing software to bring blockchain’s immutability to AI applications—and it will have ample resources to execute on its vision, with a $20 million Series A led by crypto-focused venture capital firms Framework Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, Arrington Capital, and Hivemind Capital.
Space and Time had already raised $20 million in September 2022 led by Microsoft M12 Ventures, which also participated in the Series A.
“We are moving into a world driven by artificial intelligence. That means you don’t know what is generated by artificial intelligence and what is generated by humans or companies,” says Nate Holiday, co-founder and CEO of Space and Time., told Assets in an interview. “We think it’s extremely important to be in the middle of things to ensure that there is that auditability, trust and transparency when building applications in this new space-time driven world.”
AI x Blockchain
Space and Time’s argument is simple, at least technologically speaking. The promise of crypto is that data can be encoded directly into blockchains, without the need for intermediaries. This means that it cannot be tampered with or misinterpreted as long as you know how to handle it and what to look for. When you send a transaction from one Bitcoin wallet holder to another, there is no bank or broker sitting in between that could misrepresent the process.
AI is the exact opposite in many cases. The applications we’ve become accustomed to, such as ChatGPT, are black boxes – we ask them a question and get an output, but we get little insight into the process and no way to find out. That means if the answer is wrong, there’s no way to understand how the agent came up with the supposed solution.
On a higher level, Space and Time addresses the thorny issue of verifiability. The company’s technology is designed to ensure that when an AI application produces an output, you can confirm where it came from and, ideally, that it’s correct. Holiday argues that this is possible via blockchain, which is essentially just a kind of database that is theoretically more immune to human intervention.
Initially, Space and Time pitched its solution only to blockchain companies, positioning itself as a sort of decentralized version of the data storage service Snowflake. In other words, it would serve as a data warehouse, but unlike other crypto-native solutions like Filecoin, Space and Time would be designed to allow applications to quickly retrieve and access data. This plan proved attractive to companies building in the world of DeFi, which involves financial platforms that need to store massive amounts of user information that needs to be constantly updated, such as lending apps.
Michael Anderson, co-founder of Framework Ventures, said that the analogue to Web3 Snowflake is what originally attracted him to Space and Time, as he realized that the use cases could be expanded. He said the idea now is to take the benefits of blockchain verifiability and apply them to non-blockchain applications, such as traditional financial institutions that can use blockchain-native tools (namely ZK proofs) to compare third-party data, such as personally identifiable information (PII). For example, if banks and DMVs were to integrate Snowflake, Space and Time could help banks use DMV data to verify a person’s age without having to store the data themselves.
AI represents the next frontier. As AI agents begin to perform tasks for us on the internet, such as booking flights, they will need to be able to programmatically perform transactions while observing rules for using credit cards or verifying the accuracy of data. In this future world, Space and Time aims to be the blockchain-native database that new applications and the AI agents that interact with them rely on.
Of course, since crypto and AI are still in their early stages, a lot still needs to go right for this type of technology to gain widespread adoption. Still, Space and Time is making enough progress to attract investment from some of the leading blockchain venture capital funds, as well as Microsoft, which is looking to compete with other so-called hyperscalers like Google and Amazon. In addition to its database solutions, Space and Time is also using Microsoft’s generative AI products to create blockchain app development tools that are available to its customers.
“(Space and Time) has real people building real technology, which is harder to find especially in the blockchain x AI space,” Anderson said. “When you see entrepreneurs like them emerging, it makes you excited about blockchain.”
