New York, April 16, 2025 - Today, we’re thrilled to announce that ORO has raised a $6 million seed round led by a16z crypto and Delphi Ventures, with participation from NEAR Foundation, Ocular, Orange DAO, and 0G Labs.

This funding will help us expand the two core pillars of ORO:

1. A consumer-facing app where individuals can contribute both existing and net-new data through quests and account connections, earning meaningful rewards in return.

2. A privacy-preserving protocol that enables AI developers to train on private data without ever accessing the raw inputs — preserving data integrity, user anonymity, and economic value at the same time.

Together, these systems form a new kind of intelligence infrastructure: one where people don’t give their data away, but contribute it securely and get rewarded as it fuels the next generation of AI models.

Private Data is the New Bottleneck

We’re entering a new era - one where machines don’t just compute, they think. We’ve taken something as elemental as processed rock and built systems that rival human cognition.

Earlier this month, Sam Altman and the OpenAI team announced the rollout of GPT-4.5, a significant update to the most widely deployed frontier model. In their words:

The world of GPT-4 was compute-constrained. With GPT-4.5+, we’ve entered a world that is data-constrained.

Altman went further: “This is a crazy update that the world hasn’t understood yet.”

This marks a real inflection point. For years, AI advancement was gated by access to scale - bigger clusters, faster accelerators. But now, the core limitation isn’t compute. It’s data.

Public data has been scraped dry and the next generation of models can’t be trained on static archives. They require something richer: private, real-world intelligence. Yet, most of that intelligence remains untapped. It sits locked inside siloed platforms, inaccessible to the broader ecosystem, or never created in the first place.

This is where ORO comes in. We’re building the missing infrastructure for this next chapter of AI, where private data becomes accessible in a way that is economically aligned, privacy-preserving, and collectively beneficial. Our platform gives individuals a way to safely contribute high-signal data to the AI systems shaping the future and to get rewarded for doing so.

The Intelligence Layer for AI

ORO is a decentralized intelligence platform that makes private data usable for AI in a way that preserves privacy, control, and economic alignment. It’s built on two tightly integrated layers:

First, a consumer app where individuals can contribute both existing and net-new data by connecting accounts and completing high-signal quests. As AI developers leverage this data, contributors earn rewards tied to the value their data helps unlock.

Second, a privacy-preserving protocol that enables AI models to train on this data without ever accessing the raw inputs. Powered by secure enclaves (TEEs), zkTLS, and encryption, ORO enforces privacy and integrity at the compute layer, not just in policy.

What makes this possible isn’t just the tech stack - it’s the alignment. ORO is designed from the ground up to preserve the scarcity of contributed data, enforce fair rewards, and provide developers with access to data that’s both high-quality and compliant by default.

The result is a new kind of data supply chain that turns individual contributions into collective intelligence without compromising trust, quality, or ownership.

Looking Ahead

With this capital, we’re accelerating on every front. We’re growing the team, expanding the product, and scaling our privacy infrastructure to support more data types, more contributors, and more advanced model training.

Season 1 is just the beginning. We’ll be launching new data verticals, opening up developer access, and expanding the ways individuals can contribute intelligence to the ecosystem. The world is waking up to the value of private data. ORO is where it starts to flow.

Join Us

Our mission is to build the intelligence layer for AI: powered by private data, protected by cryptography, and owned by its creators.

If you're excited to shape the next generation of AI, we’d love to have you involved.

• Contribute: Join the waitlist to start earning and contributing private data to frontier AI systems.

• Collaborate: If you’re an AI developer, researcher, or builder working on the frontier and need access to high-quality private data, we’d love to connect.

• Connect: Stay updated on our progress and connect with the community: Follow @getoro_xyz on Twitter and join our Discord.

The next era of intelligence is being built now. Be part of where it starts.

About ORO

ORO is a decentralized intelligence platform unlocking high-quality private data for frontier AI. Through a consumer app and a privacy-preserving protocol, ORO enables individuals to contribute existing and net-new data, while ensuring that raw inputs remain private and contributors are fairly rewarded when their data powers AI models.

Backed by a16z crypto, Delphi Ventures, and NEAR Foundation, we’re building toward a future where private data fuels AI progress and everyone shares in the upside.

Our team brings deep expertise in AI, cryptography, and distributed systems, with backgrounds at Stanford AI Lab, Scale AI, Replit, Salesforce, Google DeepMind, Amazon AI, and Binance. Together, we’ve built AI products used by millions, designed large-scale data infrastructure, and advanced privacy-preserving model training.