Kaito, a startup building an artificial intelligence (AI) search engine tailored to the crypto industry, has raised $5.5 million in a Series A funding round at a $87.5 million valuation. The new funding was led by early-stage crypto venture capital (VC) firm Superscrypt and Spartan, following a $5.3 million raise led by tech VC Dragonfly and included Sequoia Capital China and Jane Street in February.
Crypto firms are increasingly turning to AI, either to complement revenue streams or to enhance products and features, said Yu Hu, Kaito’s founder and CEO. Even with plugins, ChatGPT today does not connect to many off-chain crypto-specific information silos or on-chain data, thereby unable to meet people’s needs in the [crypto] space.
Kaito’s search engine combines large language models (LLMs) with real-time access to data from the web, including Twitter, Discord, Telegram, governance forums, Medium, Mirror, industry research, news, Kaito’s proprietary Twitter Space and podcast transcripts, as well as on-chain data. LLMs, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are artificial neural networks trained on large datasets of language, such that they can understand and generate human-like texts.
CoinDesk had a chance to try out Kaito’s search prompts. When asked about the potential impact of the launch of an exchange-traded fund by an arm of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, on bitcoin, the chatbot linked ten news articles on the topic and generated an ambivalent answer.
The potential approval of BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF could have a positive impact on the crypto market, as it would make investing in BTC easier for institutional investors and increase institutional adoption, Kaito AI said. However, there is also some doubt about the impact of the ETF on the market, as some reports suggest that the effects of the Bitcoin halving may be overblown. Overall, it seems that the impact of the BlackRock ETF on the Bitcoin market is still uncertain and will depend on a variety of factors.