0G Labs, or Zero Gravity Labs, the developer of a modular blockchain focused on decentralized artificial intelligence applications, has raised $35 million in pre-seed funding.

A host of investors joined the round, including Hack VC, OKX Ventures, GSR, Animoca Brands, Arca, NGC Ventures, DWF Labs, Foresight Ventures, gumi Cryptos Capital and Dispersion Capital, 0G Labs said Tuesday — adding that it aimed to create "a decentralized cap table" with many investors in the round.

This was a single round structured as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) with token warrants, Michael Heinrich, co-founder and CEO of 0G Labs, told The Block. He declined to comment on the valuation.

What is 0G Labs? 0G Labs is a modular blockchain project building a data availability system. Data availability in blockchain technology ensures that all transaction data is accessible to nodes or validators, enabling them to independently verify transactions and update the blockchain without needing to trust each other.

0G is developing a modular data availability layer with both a general-purpose storage layer and a data publishing lane. "By separating these key data availability tasks, 0G significantly improves its ability to scale up and handle large data flows," the project said. "This creates a data availability system that can better guarantee for users that a given piece of data is available to anyone who wishes to retrieve it."

The demand for data availability layers will grow as decentralized AI applications grow, according to 0G. Therefore, the project bills its tool as a "modular AI chain" focused on offering a scalable and programmable data availability layer for AI dapps.

'Faster and cheaper' 0G said its modular AI chain will be 50,000x faster than competitors while maintaining a cost that is 100x cheaper at 50 gigabytes per second compared to competitor rates of 1.5 megabytes per second.

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"We finally bring web3 to web2 performance and cost parity," Heinrich said. "We also figured out a way to horizontally scale our consensus layers so we can get to infinite data availability scalability. This is just like adding more Amazon Web Services servers to keep scaling in a web2 context. This is a major unlock for the web3 space and can lead to new on-chain applications like on-chain AI, on-chain gaming, high-frequency DeFi, etc.," he added.

As for 0G's focus on AI, Heinrich said since decentralized storage is part of 0G's data availability layer, it can support storing models, encrypted user requests, training data, etc.

Founded last year, 0G is now ready to launch its testnet in the coming days and aims to launch mainnet in July, Heinrich said.

Modular blockchains Modular blockchain developers are growing in popularity. Several startups in that category have raised funds in recent weeks.

Last month, Avail, a modular blockchain project that spun out of Polygon last year, raised $27 million in a seed funding round co-led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Dragonfly.

Modular projects Lava and Inco also raised funds last month.