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Crypto is much ado about AI these days, and two Solana startups recently closed funding rounds for businesses merging AI with social applications.
Social graph protocol Tapestry announced a $5.75 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures and Fabric Ventures, and Oh raised $4.5 million in seed funding to “build AI agents for the spicy content industry.” The pair of fundraises both came with expansive ideas about the future of AI — and how humans can still stake a claim to that future.
Tapestry is focused on creating onchain social graphs, which describes an individual and all their connections online. The protocol takes social profile and connection data and stores it onchain using the same technological ideas as Solana’s compressed NFTs, which is how the social app DRiP makes its blockchain usage cost-effective, for instance.
Decentralized social graphs are a popular idea in crypto. Aave founder Stani Kulechov started Lens, which lets users own their social graphs on Ethereum. The popular crypto social app Farcaster does something similar. Generally, these projects are built around the idea that social media users should own their data rather than let their data be monetized by someone else, as is the case with legacy social media.
With one Tapestry account, a user could sign into any platform with social features that has Tapestry integrated. The startup’s pitch combines this fact with AI vision casting.
“In a world of abundant AI creation, thousands of viral, ephemeral web apps will emerge over the next decade — far outpacing iOS apps. A unified social layer enables these apps to thrive outside App Store constraints,” the project wrote on X.
Still, crypto social graph projects have so far failed to catch on. Tapestry makes social apps composable, but its graph arguably only becomes valuable once lots of teams integrate it in the first place. Tapestry founder David Gabeau admitted Tapestry has a lot of work to do but said its service is still useful, particularly in the looming age of AI.
“Right now, using Solana is very similar to using Google on Incognito mode,” Gabeau told me. If AI is going to simplify Solana app creation, then Tapestry can help users take something like a Google profile from app to app, he said.
Then there’s Oh, a sexed-up AI companionship platform that will be integrating with Solana for its token offerings. Its seed round drew participation from Tangent and Big Brain Holdings, among others. The platform claims to be combining OpenAI with OnlyFans in that it is developing centralized AI models with decentralized distribution of revenue.
Its proof of concept for this model came with the so-called digital twins it created for a handful of risque models. Whoever creates a digital twin or an original AI bot on the platform receives 80% of the revenue the models generate from users paying to interact with them.
A year and a half ago, SocialFi just referred to giving users ownership or a financial stake in their social presence. Today, some sort of AI tie-in seems to be becoming table stakes for the sector.
