Imagine never folding laundry again. The internet trained LLMs, but robots and self-driving cars need training data that is much more challenging to source. Poseidon enables the collection, curation, and licensing of real-world data to accelerate physical AI. Use cases:

I’m genuinely surprised to see @a16z quadruple down on a single project, but it makes sense if they view Poseidon as the catalyst for $IP. @psdnai sources and curates high quality datasets, tokenizes them on @StoryProtocol for full provenance, and connects suppliers with AI teams through automated licensing and payments. That level of licensing and compliance at scale is only possible with Story’s IP rails. Every data trade becomes real blockspace usage and locks $IP into the payment flow, tying token demand to AI data growth. If Poseidon draws both suppliers and buyers, it could turn into Story’s flagship app, fueling on-chain activity, fee volume, and the token utility Story needs to stand alone as an IP chain (team already hints demand has been confirmed by top robotics groups). It also locks Story into the broader AI economy, giving investors a clear line between Story’s upside and a sector that’s expanding fast. First up: training data for robotics. Next stops: audio, biometric, and healthcare datasets.

<Poseidon: AI’s Full-Stack Infrastructure for IP-Cleared Training Data> Today, Poseidon is launching: a new infrastructure layer for AI, incubated by Story and backed by $15M from a16z crypto, built to fix its most broken input: training data. Nvidia is valued at over $4 trillion. AMD sits at $255 billion. OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and others are worth over $500 billion combined. Each differentiate on data, not models or compute. AI data today is fragmented, unlicensed and legally-risky. Major labs and enterprises are reassessing their data pipelines. Contracts are being paused or pulled. Poseidon exists to change this and there is demand for high-quality, IP-cleared training data. Poseidon, a new protocol incubated by Story and backed by $15M from a16z crypto, is building full-stack infrastructure on our blockchain to collect, curate, and license real-world data critical for next-gen AI. It’s underpinned by a core belief: that data is one of the most valuable and under-structured forms of IP, and that Story’s infrastructure is uniquely suited to bring it on-chain. Poseidon is a native extension of the Story blockchain and a foundational piece of our Chapter 2 vision. Poseidon is focused on the long tail. Not scraped web data, but POV video, biometric audio, multilingual speech, and sensor-rich logs from edge devices and robotics systems. The kind of data that can’t be faked, guessed, or scraped—and is essential for physical AI. For AI teams, Poseidon provides clarity and coordination. They define exactly what data they need. Contributors—from phones, dashcams, clinics, and wearables—supply it. Poseidon curates, de-identifies, labels, and prepares it for commercial use. Every dataset is registered on-chain as IP through Story. What makes this different is the stack underneath. From the start, Story was designed to support the entire lifecycle of IP:from registration and attribution to licensing and royalty flows. That includes art, music, fiction, and synthetic media, and now real-world datasets. Every dataset becomes an IP asset. Every contributor is permissioned and rewarded. Every model output is linked to transparent provenance. Poseidon is the data layer for the AI-native IP economy. And it’s only possible because of what Story makes possible under the hood. -- What brings this vision to life is the team. @SPChinchali, our Chief AI Officer at Story and now Poseidon's Chief Scientist, has spent the past decade confronting the hardest problems in real-world AI—how to capture edge-case data, train models at the edge, and build systems that can reason outside the lab. His belief in crypto infrastructure came from direct experience, and that conviction has only deepened. @sarickshah, formerly Lead AI Engineer at Story, has built and deployed machine learning systems across telco, finance, and logistics. At Story, he helped advance influence function research and natural language tooling for IP indexing. Now he leads Poseidon as Head of Product. @WhatTheLJW, previously Head of Special Projects at Story and a senior researcher at Harvard Crypto Lab, leads strategy and operations. LJW brings a rare blend of protocol-level thinking and operational fluency—he understands both the architecture and how to scale it. These are builders who have been thinking about this problem for years. What’s changed now is that the world is catching up to why it matters. To ensure Story’s incubation model is executed with full conviction, I’ll be serving as Poseidon’s founding president while continuing in my day-to-day role as Story’s CEO, working closely with Sandeep, Sarick, and LJW to bring this infrastructure to market. This is how seriously we take real-world data as a vertical of IP—one that must be tokenized, made programmable, and brought fully on-chain through Story. -- In the age of physical AI, data is the new moat. Poseidon is how we build it—ethically, securely, and at scale. This is what Chapter 2 looks like in motion. Let’s build.

Grateful to share that I’m joining @psdnai as a founding member and VP of Strategy & Ops. We’re announcing a $15M seed round led by @a16zcrypto and incubation by @StoryProtocol to build the data layer for AI, designed for the real world. There are 3 competitive races in AI: models, compute, and data. Most model architectures are open-sourced and rapidly replicated, shrinking their competitive advantage. The half life of innovation at the model layer is getting shorter and shorter. Compute is a monopoly: GPU access is controlled by a few incumbents like Nvidia, making scale a function of capital. The data layer is wide open, and it's the most valuable piece of the AI stack that has yet to be solved. My path here has followed a consistent throughline: how emerging technologies like blockchain and AI reshape coordination and value creation. At Harvard, I helped launch and co-led the Crypto Lab with @skominers, researching how blockchains and marketplaces can reshape industries. At @StoryProtocol, I worked as Head of Special Projects, mostly focused on the intersection of AI and IP. This included hosting conversations with leading AI leaders, writing research deep dives on AI x Crypto (H/T to @svenwelly for the collaboration), and AI incubations. Alongside, I’ve spent the last few years writing, advising, and helping launch ventures at the frontier of AI, crypto, and digital IP. In the last few months, I've had the pleasure to work with @SPChinchali and @sarickshah to explore ideas in AI. We followed a very 0 to 1 approach, speaking with a few dozen leading AI companies to understand where they were bottlenecked. Over and over again, we heard they weren't bottlenecked at the model architecture or compute layer, but that data was running dry from the well of the Internet. What’s left no longer offers a competitive advantage because everyone has access to it. What they needed instead was long tail / hard-to-get data that was ideally created for their use case. Data like people doing common chores in first person, or people reading transcripts in dialects that weren't readily available. More importantly, they want the data to be IP-cleared so that they can legitimately commercialize whatever they build downstream. AI’s data layer is a coordination game: how do we match supply and demand such that everyone is happy. Poseidon is the most concrete realization of these needs that connects the dots: → Data is IP → IP needs infrastructure (cue @StoryProtocol) → Infrastructure needs to work for, not against, AI (cue @psdnai) Poseidon aims to: (1) create a data layer that coordinates the supply and demand for data (2) enshrine the rights to that data on Story L1 as programmable IP so AI systems can legitimately use it Poseidon is only possible on Story's IP blockchain. We are excited to go on this journey and build at the intersection of two of the most important technologies of our lifetimes. Thanks to all who supported, more to come soon!

Excited to announce we’re leading a $15M seed round in Poseidon, which was incubated by @StoryProtocol and is building a decentralized data layer to coordinate supply and demand for AI training data. The first generation of AI foundation models were trained on data that seemed to be an effectively unlimited resource. Today, the most accessible resources such as books and websites have mostly been exhausted, and data has become a limiting factor in AI progress. Much of the data that remains now is either lower quality or off-limits due to IP protections. For some of the most promising AI applications — across robotics, autonomous vehicles, and spatial intelligence — the data doesn’t even exist yet. Now these systems need entirely new types of information: multi-sensory, rich in edge cases, captured in the wild. Where will all this physical-world data come from? The challenge isn't just technical — it’s a problem of coordination. Thousands of contributors must work together in a distributed way to source, label, and maintain the physical data that next-gen AI needs. We believe no centralized approach can efficiently orchestrate the data creation and curation that’s needed at the required level of scale and diversity. A decentralized approach can solve this. @psdnai allows suppliers to collect the data AI companies need, while ensuring IP safety via Story’s programmable IP license. This seeks to establish a new economic foundation for the internet, where data creators get fairly compensated for helping AI companies power the next generation of intelligent systems. Poseidon’s team, led by Chief Scientist and Cofounder @SPChinchali, brings deep expertise in AI infrastructure. Sandeep is a professor at UT Austin specializing in AI, robotics, and distributed systems, with a PhD from Stanford in AI and distributed systems. Head of Product and Cofounder @sarickshah spent a decade as a machine learning engineer, scaling AI products for large enterprises across financial services, telecom, and healthcare. We are excited to support Poseidon in its work to solve one of the most critical bottlenecks in AI development.

AI is moving beyond the browser and into the real world. The bottleneck? Data. Today we’re announcing a $15M seed round led by @a16zcrypto to build infra that collects, curates, and licenses high-quality data for physical AI. Incubated by and built on @StoryProtocol.

What flows like water 🔱

We asked the @SPChinchali about the role of IP in the age of AI. "Essentially all public data sets have a non-commercial license. "Sometimes generative AI models that create imagery could have been trained on IP unsafe data and they cannot even use synthetic data." "What @StoryProtocol is really focusing on is the next generation of foundation models." "You can't just scrape that data on the internet."

Sandeep is one of the smartest people I've gotten to know (also super humble)

a long time ago I worked with a tire company that used to run demos for sales people at a track they built here's an m3 on the cheapest tires money can buy here's a minivan on half worn good tires see how fast you can get around the track in each minivan won every time much of life is like this you focus on your car but you should be thinking about your tires