DePIN Grass raises $10M from Polychain, Tribe Capital

Grass previously raised a seed and Series A rounds and plans to utilize the token purchase to execute on its roadmap

article-image

hitam putih 83/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks

share

Grass, the Solana DePIN project, is raising $10 million in a bridge raise, Blockworks has exclusively learned. 

The project previously raised both a seed and a Series A round

Polychain and Tribe Capital participated in the bridge round, which is primarily a token purchase, Grass’s Andrej Radonjic told Blockworks.

“Grass is a piece of technology that allows companies to access data at an unprecedented scale,” Radonjic said when asked why Grass was interested in a token purchase. The decentralized AI project allows folks to sell idle internet bandwidth.

“The possibilities are kind of endless in terms of the directions that you’re able to go. And there are multiple things that we think are vital to build on top of this, namely live context retrieval.”

He further explained that, at this moment, the way AI companies are training their models is to scrape search engines such as Google. However, they can’t deploy internet-scale web crawls because they’re being blocked, but Grass offers a solution. 

Grass wasn’t necessarily actively looking to raise at the moment, Radonjic said, but it happened at the right time for the team. 

“I was mentioning that commercially, things are going really well, and…we’re seeing amazing growth in terms of selling training data to AI companies that are looking to train things like video models and text to speech models,” he said. 

“But I had mentioned that one of the things that we’re looking forward to over the next year to two years…[is actually] having Grass become infrastructure for not just training data, but also inference data.”

There’ll be a shift from compute cycles on training to inference, and the Grass team wants to get ahead of it. The end goal will be to do an “internet scale web crawl,” which would allow them to build out the live context retrieval. 

“Rarely have we come across a team executing as ferociously as the Grass team does. They are an archetypical example of how businesses built on distributed systems can outcompete web2 peers,” Polychain’s Josh Rosenthal told Blockworks in a statement. 

“After leading their Seed round, participating in their Series A, and now leading this round, this is the third time Polychain Capital has backed Grass…We’re thrilled to triple down on Grass at such a meaningful inflection point of their journey as a leading data and AI business.”

In a cycle that’s hyper-focused on crypto use cases, Grass is offering a more crypto native use case than, say, stablecoins. But it’s also operating in a space — AI — that’s just as lucrative as it is competitive.

“Since we invested in 2023, Grass has served as a benchmark for how we want our portfolio companies to operate — a diabolical focus on product and revenue,” Boris Revsin, CEO and Managing Director of Tribe Capital, told Blockworks. 

“Grass is a product leader and we have seen major 7-figure clients, including the largest AI labs, sign up in the last 12 months. That’s what matters. Everything else follows.” 

In the last 30 days, Grass has had 8.5 million monthly active users and is currently working with around 20 companies, as well as with nonprofits and universities. 

The structuring of the round was never really “a question,” Radonjic explained. 

“The Grass Foundation…faces all of our customers contractually. And all the revenue that these customers are paying is going straight into the Grass Foundation’s bank account…The GRASS token is the primary vehicle for value accrual for everything that we’re doing.”

Updated 10/7/2025 at 1:15 pm ET for clarity.

Updated 10/7/2025 at 2:30 pm ET to correct a byline error.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Javits Center North | 445 11th Ave

Tues - Thurs, March 24 - 26, 2026

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template (1).jpg

Research

As AI supercharges surveillance, privacy becomes a prerequisite and the winning stack will combine confidentiality with selective disclosure. Zcash’s Tachyon, composable standards on Ethereum/Solana, and compliance-aware pools aim to make private rails the new norm.

article-image

Pineapple begins deploying its $100 million Injective Digital Asset Treasury, staking INJ to earn yield and fund onchain mortgage ambitions

by Blockworks /
article-image

Staking levels in the ether funds will depend on protocol unstaking queue times and anticipated redemption activity, firm says

article-image

ETF inflows, miner strength, and tightening supply drive Bitcoin past its prior peak amid renewed demand for scarce assets

by Blockworks /
article-image

The Guidestar team, led by Alex Nezlobin, will join Uniswap Labs to enhance automated market maker design and smart order routing

by Blockworks /
article-image

Zac Prince spearheads Galaxy’s push into consumer banking with high-yield cash, crypto, and stock trading features

by Blockworks /