Reppo Labs Successfully Raises $2.2 Million to Revolutionize Collaboration Between AI Agents and Data Owners

Reppo Labs, an innovative venture emerging from Protocol Labs Venture Studio in March 2024, has successfully secured $2.2 million in funding to construct essential infrastructure for permissionless collaboration on specialized datasets. This platform bridges the gap between data owners and AI developers, allowing AI agents to communicate needs and negotiate data access directly, eliminating the need for intermediaries. This breakthrough unlocks price discovery and demand for data that would typically remain isolated. The team is developing an intent-centric Data Exchange, utilizing Anoma and secured by Gateway Protocol. Reppo’s distinctive strategy harnesses programmable IP co-ownership as an incentive mechanism, ensuring equitable use and compensation for data owners—who may not fully grasp the immediate value of their data—enabling them to reap benefits from downstream revenue generated by derived IP and its applications.

Raghav (RG) Rmadya, CEO and Founder of Reppo Labs, commented.

“Anyone claiming to build a blockchain specifically for AI is most likely a scam. It’s nothing more than a narrative play. Most blockchains today can already support agentic workflows and AI applications. The more likely future is that each agent or application will have its own chain. In such a world, models, agents, and applications will need permissionless ways to self-source their fuel i.e. data to grow and stay relevant. The days of spoon-feeding AI will soon be over.”

“Unfortunately, current data sources and pipelines are drying up. Ilya Sutskever highlighted this problem at NeurIPS last year, and the recent acquisition of Carbon by Perplexity underscores the growing demand for novel data connectors in the AI industry. Web3 has experimented with DataDAOs as a potential solution, but they are yet to prove scalable. Not all data in the world is user-owned; business-owned data is vast and often untapped. For instance, DePIN node operators generate enormous amounts of operational data that might seem mundane to some but is gold to us.”

“Incentives for these data owners are completely missing. When off-chain dark data becomes accessible to AI builders and agents, amazing things can happen. One example is our work incubating AI auditors for solar farms on the Glow Network. These auditors, trained entirely on off-chain data, automate and decentralize network audits that currently rely on centralized actors. The same applies to many other DePINs.
The Crypto x AI ecosystem is starved for niche and novel data—the ‘good nectar.’ Anyone building ‘decentralized’ models or agents today either relies on the same on-chain data streams, pre-cleaned and parameterized datasets, or centralized LLMs trained on a mere 0.1% of the world’s data while competing in a zero-sum game. It’s ironic, to say the least.”

Brad Holden, Partner at Protocol VC, said,

“What excites us about Reppo is the team’s ability to contextualize and solve challenges they encountered during their time at Filecoin for the broader Web3 and AI ecosystem. Their focus on making off-chain data accessible to build practical AI/ML models and agents is critical for tackling bottlenecks like insurance underwriting, node auditing, and SLA management for blockchain networks, especially for DePINs that we at Protocol VC are ultra bullish on. Few teams take such a systems approach to solving wicked problems and it was a no-brainer for us to partner with Reppo. I’m ecstatic about their mission to democratize permissionless access to previously untapped data for AI developers and agents.”

The $2.2 million funding round saw contributions from Protocol Labs, CV VC, and CMS Holdings, with a notable chunk raised on Echo.xyz, where the initial allocation was snapped up in under 10 minutes. Prominent angel investors in the space feature Charles Songhurst, Lincoln of MH Ventures, Dieter Fishbein from Anoma, Thomas France, co-founder of Ledger, Nicolas Pinto from Cygni Labs, among others.