Ritual

Ritual is a technology company building a network for open AI infrastructure, bringing artificial intelligence on-chain through a sovereign execution layer designed for AI-native operations. Founded in 2023 and based in New York, the company has raised $25m in Series A funding and employs between 11 and 50 people. Its stated mission is to build the schelling point for AI in web3, with a focus on open AI infrastructure, censorship resistance and computational integrity.

The company's first product is Infernet, a decentralised oracle network that allows any protocol, application or smart contract to access AI models with just a few lines of code. Ritual's work spans artificial intelligence, blockchain and on-chain infrastructure, cryptography, verifiable computation, privacy-preserving schemes, decentralised oracle networks and AI model integration, serving the web3, blockchain protocol and artificial intelligence verticals.

Ritual works with a group of advisors that includes Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, and Sreeram Kannan, founder of EigenLayer. The team is small and distributed around New York, working across the intersection of AI systems and decentralised infrastructure.