Each week we will share the latest artificial intelligence news and insights, curated for professionals, board members, and entrepreneurs, as we learn to navigate together the opportunities and threats arising from the evolution of AI and technology.
This week in AI
In AI news this week, we announce the production launch of our first token gated AI community and share the latest funding news.
AI Forum’s token gated community
AI Forum’s first token gated community is now live, launching with our Advisory Board. Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) are typically associated with collectibles, but the use cases for NFTs are much larger covering memberships, attendance badges, website domains and even a possible future for a secure digital identity.
Utilising Ethereum standard ERC-721, AI Forum membership NFTs are based on a tried and tested technology with some considerable benefits, the most convenient being the elimination of logins and passwords.
The process for each community is similar. For example, 144 Advisory Board NFTs were minted and can be found on the Polygon Network – an Ethereum-like Blockchain which is a leader in NFT eco system development.
After minting, NFTs are distributed to the Metamask wallets of community members and joining instructions are sent to enter the community application, developed by token gating category leaders Whaleroom.
Current functionality enables community members to join group discussions, direct message other members, edit profiles and have community specific access to market research, news feeds and special offers.
From Ian Gilmour, Chair of the Advisory Board, “The expertise we have developed in explaining NFTs to the AI community, and training our Customer Service team to onboard and support our customers is being fed back in real-time to the developers. The future evolution of our community technology will be bespoke to AI use cases, so we expect a lot of innovation”
Arjun Krishan Kalsy, VP of Growth at Polygon added, “Polygon has one of the largest NFT eco-systems in the world with over twenty thousand decentralised applications, “dapps”, live on its chain. Collectibles and Gaming are already significant activities and the roll-out of web3 use cases from firms like AI Forum demonstrates how Polygon is at the forefront of innovation and community adoption”
Along with our Silver, Gold and Platinum NFT memberships, new token gated communities will include AI GEN, AI Forum’s student and youth community, and a comprehensive NFT based AI Directory for people, legal entities and DAOs.
AI Funding News
Acrisure in Grand Rapids, Michigan, raised $725 million, on the back of a Private Equity round of three point five billion US Dollars in 2021. The firm provides “intelligence-driven financial services solutions for insurance, reinsurance, real estate services, cyber services and asset and wealth management” leveraging partner technologies such as TrustLayer with its robotic process automation (RPA), which reduces the cost of insurance verification.
Hoxhunt, based in Espoo, Finland, raised $40 million in Series B finance led by Level Equity Management and Ice Breaker. Hoxhunt uses Machine Learning to augment their cyber security training platform, enabling client employees to accelerate their skills when dealing increasingly sophisticated attack vectors. Then funding will accelerate growth into new markets, such as North America.
Continuing with the cybersecurity trend in funding markets, Ordr, based in Santa Clara, California, USA, raised $40 million in Series C finance led by Ten Eleven Ventures and Battery Ventures. Focused on the fast growth in the Internet of Things (IoT), Ordr uses an AI based engine to inspect, classify and baseline each device, and operates in a number of verticals including Healthcare and Finance.
Other deals in the Cybersecurity / AI space include Devo’s Series F raise of $100 million and Jupiter One who raised $70 million in Series C.
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