Decentralized Science Receives $65 Million Investment from the Sei Foundation
Sapien Capital Launches $65 Million Fund to Empower Decentralised Science
The Sei Foundation has announced the launch of a new fund, Sapien Capital - Open Science Fund 1, dedicated to investing in projects within the Decentralised Science (DeSci) sector. The fund, worth $65 million, aims to support the development and scaling of decentralized scientific research by leveraging blockchain technologies.
At the heart of this initiative is the goal to decentralize genomic and health data management, empowering individuals with control and monetization rights over their own data. This move aims to address issues such as data breaches and unfair compensation in traditional centralized platforms, like the 2023 incident involving 6.9 million users of 23andMe.
The fund will utilize blockchain solutions such as on-chain record-keeping with smart contracts for transparent user consent, zero-knowledge proofs for privacy-preserving verification, and trusted execution environments (TEEs) for secure analysis. The aim is to create a secure, transparent, and user-owned data marketplace.
Sapien Capital - Open Science Fund 1 will also support a wide range of applications, including on-chain health data exchanges and launchpads for researchers. This will facilitate decentralized drug discovery and scientific innovation.
Justin Barlow, head of business development and investments at Sei Foundation, believes that DeSci has the potential to scale due to its impact across healthcare, science, and biotech. He stated, "This fund is part of Sei’s broader strategy to lead in DeSci by providing the required speed, throughput, and capital."
The fund, fully backed by the Sei Foundation with no external capital committed, plans to deploy its full $65 million capital over the next three to four years. The funding check sizes will range from $100,000 to $2 million. The fund targets projects exclusively building the layer-1 blockchain, Sei.
The launch of Sapien Capital - Open Science Fund 1 marks a significant step towards fostering decentralized innovation in science. The initiative aims to expand total value locked (TVL) in the DeSci ecosystem and attract institutional interest in this emerging field.
The fund's ethos promotes fair compensation for scientists, the sharing and access of research data on-chain, and fostering a culture of decentralized communities. This move towards decentralized science could potentially reshape industries like healthcare, scientific research, and genomics through decentralization.
The integration with technologies like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables standardized API connections between AI agents and blockchain data/services on Sei. This overcomes past limitations like custom code needs and lack of unified verification, ensuring transparent, multi-agent, and cross-chain operations for advanced scientific research implementations.
The Sei Foundation remains open to working with external investors or limited partners in the future, indicating a potential expansion of the fund's scope and influence in the DeSci sector. The announcement of the fund was made on Wednesday.
- Sapien Capital's $65 million fund, intended for decentralized scientific research, will invest in projects that intersect with science, technology, and finance, making it an attractive option for those in the field of investing in cutting-edge scientific research.
- As part of its goal to foster decentralized innovation in science, Sapien Capital's Open Science Fund 1 will support projects in various technology-driven sectors like health data exchanges, drug discovery, and AI research, with a focus on the Sei blockchain.
