Today, we are proud to announce the closure of our $12M Series A round, led by Variant Fund and Polychain Capital, bringing our total funding to $20M. This milestone is particularly meaningful as we secured investors who share our vision of democratizing AI through an open and accessible ecosystem. Reflecting on this growth, I am reminded of the two core principles that drove my co-founder Yuchen and me to commit to Hyperbolic: the stories of innovators and a steadfast belief in a positive-sum game.
My Hyperbolic Story
For those who are new here, I’m Jasper Zhang. I earned my Math Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in just two years, after winning gold at the Alibaba Global Math Competition and the Chinese Mathematical Olympiad. Along the way, I found myself exploring different worlds: from the fast-paced halls of Citadel Securities to the pioneering blockchain research at Ava Labs. Now, as CEO of Hyperbolic, my focus is on something that feels deeply meaningful: making AI innovations more accessible to everyone.
I have always loved the simple elegance and beauty of mathematics—being able to derive a complete world from just a few basic axioms. With mathematics being the foundation of everything, I saw it as my entry point for one day changing the world and making a significant contribution to human society.
Having focused on topology and hyperbolic geometry during my PhD, I found myself at a crossroads. The traditional academic path felt limiting—should I pursue a career in academia, I likely wouldn’t see the positive impact of my work on humanity. The finance industry is one where the application of mathematics has immediate, tangible impact, and so I explored quantitative research at Citadel Securities. After working in traditional finance for some years, however, I found that the industry didn’t align with my values, as making more money ultimately means that others lose out.
I have always believed that life is a positive sum game, where my success contributes to the success of others and vice versa. This belief inspired my curiosity in crypto and blockchain. As a permissionless and open ecosystem, crypto allows anyone to contribute. And if you bring value to the ecosystem, you are rewarded in return.
Motivated by this ethos, I started doing blockchain research at Avalanche to deepen my understanding of the Web3 ecosystem. In the same year, I witnessed ChatGPT and AI really take off and realized that this technology will heavily impact the future of humanity. Several of my friends are some of the brightest minds working in AI, and I was really concerned when I heard that they were struggling to access the GPU resources and AI services they needed to propel the field forward.
I saw an opportunity here to leverage my skills in mathematics and experience in Web3 to bring the permissionless ethos of crypto to the AI industry. This inspired me to start Hyperbolic Labs as a way to create an open and accessible ecosystem for AI development by delivering affordable GPU resources and verifiable inference services to developers and researchers. My goal is to empower our users to create and contribute their own services, models, and applications to the ecosystem and be rewarded for allowing others to benefit from their progress as well.
The Team Behind Hyperbolic
It’s hard to overstate how important the human element has been in shaping Hyperbolic. When I first set out to build this company, I knew I wanted it to be more than just a collection of talented individuals—it needed to feel like a family who genuinely believed in each other and the promise of open, accessible AI. That kind of environment doesn’t happen by accident; it grows when the right individuals converge around a shared purpose.
I still remember meeting my cofounder, Yuchen, at the tail end of 2022. We were just two people who had grown tired of seeing GPU access locked behind barriers and felt the future should look different—more open, more collaborative. We found ourselves finishing each other’s thoughts on where technology could go if more people had a seat at the table. The energy between us was unmistakable. When a hyperbolic snowstorm unexpectedly stranded me in Seattle, we spent extra days mapping out what Hyperbolic might become. That extended stay remains one of my most cherished memories because it marked the moment we realized we weren’t simply dreaming—our paths felt almost destined to cross, and we were truly on our way to building something unique.
From there, the team grew in the most organic way. For our first hire, I cold reached out to a talented frontend engineer, Matthew, right before ETH Denver, the biggest blockchain conference in the US, and serendipity stepped in–we were both going there. Meeting face-to-face over coffee allowed us to share the vision person-to-person, not just founder-to-engineer. Matthew’s decision to leave a well-established name like ConsenSys for this fledgling startup felt like a profound vote of confidence. It said to me: this isn’t just my dream—it’s our dream.
Yuchen and I uprooted our lives in Seattle and New York to join Matthew in California because we believed that physically working together would forge a deeper sense of trust and cohesion. It did. We didn’t just work together; we also shared in one another’s joys and sorrows, supporting each other through every high and low life brought our way.
Once we secured seed funding, our circle widened further. Matthew introduced us to his friends Viktor, Yoofi and Kai who were excited not just by the technology, but by our mission and team. And then there was the day we met Christian—he always dreamed of building a p2p GPU cloud, and he painted a vivid picture of Hyperbolic as a digital AI rainforest. In this environment, ideas wouldn’t just be planted; they would sprout and grow naturally, nourished by the collective energy of everyone involved. That metaphor stuck with me. It reflected exactly what I hoped we could become.
Bringing on Yuchen and my former teammates and friends like Lesheng, Peggy, Jeremy, Joelly and Shouqiao felt like adding familiar notes to a melody we were still composing. They knew how we worked, we knew their strengths, and together we could fill in the gaps. Over time, we shaped a team dynamic that thrived not on rigid hierarchy, but on mutual respect, shared curiosity, and a willingness to help one another succeed.
What really stood out were all the unexpected, purely human moments—tiny flashes of experience that still make me smile whenever I think about them. Like that during our San Francisco onsite when we tried Mexican tacos, watched election updates on TV, and played poker, and on the next night, we switched gears: authentic Hunan food followed by a screening of Rush Hour. Somehow, we accidentally invented what we now lovingly call the Hyperbolic handshake, and it became a secret signature of our team. One afternoon, we tackled an escape room together, and managed to crack every code and solve every puzzle. In the end, we totally missed that the door was already unlocked, a hilarious oversight that’s now part of our shared legend.
And of course, there were culinary adventures. We brought every new teammate to the best Xiao Long Bao restaurant called Seven Grams in Irvine more than ten times and playfully insisted everyone try pig ears. We also fell in love with collecting idioms from one another’s hometowns and cultures.
These moments—handshakes, escape rooms, pig ears, and idioms—taught us as much about each other as any grand vision or strategy session. They’re the stories that will live on long after the prototypes and pitch decks are outdated, and they remind me that the very best parts of building something new often happen between the formal meetings and outlined plans.
Looking back at the people who have joined Hyperbolic, I see not just colleagues, but friends who helped me shape a vision into reality. Each person who joined brought their own conviction, their own reason for believing that making AI more open and accessible would truly matter. Without them, this wouldn’t be what it is today.
It’s a rare privilege to work with people who care the vision and the team deeply. They push me to think differently, to consider perspectives I might have overlooked, and to approach each challenge with empathy and optimism. We might not have all the answers yet, but we know the kind of environment that produces them: one founded on trust, guided by shared purpose, and energized by the possibility of making something better for everyone.
That’s the team behind Hyperbolic, and I couldn’t be more grateful for each of them.
Hyperbolic Today: Building Verifiable, High-Performance AI
Today, Hyperbolic stands as an open-access AI ecosystem providing aggregated GPU compute and top-tier AI inference services. Our journey from concept to reality has been guided by a core principle: AI infrastructure should be accessible to all, verified by mathematics, and governed by its community.
Drawing from my co-founder Yuchen Jin's experiences from his AI PhD and my own expertise in verification and tokenomics from my Math PhD, we've built one of the few platforms to achieve truly verifiable, high-performance AI. We're creating an ecosystem—of the people, by the people, for the people—where AI infrastructure, services, and models are collectively contributed and governed for the benefit of all.
We’ve built a strong track record in the Web2 world, partnering with leading AI innovators like Quora, Hugging Face, OpenRouter, Black Forest Labs, Nous Research, LMSYS, and top universities including Cornell, UC Berkeley, NYU, and Stanford. As we expand into Web3, Hyperbolic seamlessly connects the two ecosystems, embracing the collaborative nature of AI’s future. Unlike many Web3 AI initiatives that fall short, Hyperbolic delivers proven results through its GPU Marketplace, Inference Services, and industry-leading Proof of Sampling (PoSP) verification protocol. By optimizing GPU performance, enhancing model precision, and offering secure, cost-effective solutions, Hyperbolic is setting a new benchmark for trustworthy, high-performance AI in the Web3 era.
A New Concept: Hyperbolic’s AI Rainforest
As we’ve grown, a new way of thinking about Hyperbolic has emerged: the AI Rainforest. This metaphor captures the essence of what we’re building—an ecosystem that thrives on interdependence, collaboration, and renewal.
Rainforests are Earth’s most vibrant ecosystems, where everything is connected, and resources are shared symbiotically. Similarly, Hyperbolic’s AI Rainforest provides fertile “soil” in the form of affordable compute, an interconnected “canopy” of services and models, wildlife as ai agents, and the “water cycle” of tokenomics that circulates value throughout the system.
Builders in Hyperbolic’s AI Rainforest have access to the resources they need to experiment, grow, and succeed, knowing that their contributions will feed back into the ecosystem, benefiting others. Learn more about the rainforest here.
What the Close of Our Series A Means for Hyperbolic
The close of our Series A marks a real turning point for Hyperbolic. After two years of testing ideas, facing challenges head-on, and gradually refining our vision, it feels like we’re stepping from the scrappy, unpredictable early days into a new chapter—one defined by clearer direction and a more confident stride.
In those first two years, we tackled some of the toughest barriers holding back AI innovation:
Inaccessible compute
Lack of access to optimized open-source models
Fragmented AI development workflows
We have also built live products to solve these problems:
Hyperbolic’s GPU Marketplace
Hyperbolic’s Inference Services
Instead of just talking about these problems, we got to work. We built the GPU Marketplace to bring accessible compute within reach. We created our Inference Services so that developers wouldn’t have to cobble together their own solutions. Each product was born of necessity, shaped by the feedback and needs of our community. Now, with this new round of funding, we’re ready to double down—to not only expand our engineering teams but also strengthen our go-to-market efforts. We want to reach the builders and thinkers who can transform these tools into thriving ecosystems of innovation.
My hope is that Hyperbolic becomes the place where AI developers and researchers come not just to solve problems, but to create. I want them to build their dreams on our infrastructure—services that are accessible, verifiable, and ready to grow alongside them. It’s about building a fertile ground where ideas can take root, flourish, and then spread to benefit everyone.
At Hyperbolic, we’ve always believed that the real magic happens when we join forces. We go further faster when we go together. Now’s your chance to be part of that. Let’s keep building—together.
With gratitude,
Dr. Jasper Zhang, Ph.D.
Co-Founder & CEO, Hyperbolic
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About Hyperbolic
Hyperbolic is democratizing AI by delivering an open ecosystem of AI infrastructure, services, and models. Through aggregating a decentralized network of global GPUs and leveraging proprietary verification technology, developers and researchers have access to reliable, scalable, and affordable compute as well as the latest open source models.
Founded by award-winning Math and AI researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of Washington, Hyperbolic is committed to creating a future where AI technology is universally accessible, verified, and collectively governed.
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