Catenaa, Friday, March 13, 2026- Decentralized AI infrastructure startup General Tensor said Wednesday it secured $5 million in seed and pre-seed funding to expand mining and validation services supporting the Bittensor ecosystem.
The San Francisco-based company said the seed round was led by Good Morning Holdings, with earlier pre-seed financing led by Lvna Capital. Additional investors included Digital Currency Group, X Ventures, Proof of Talk and Outliers Fund.
General Tensor said the funding round was oversubscribed and valued the startup at roughly $25 million after the investment.
The company operates infrastructure that mines and validates transactions on Bittensor, a blockchain designed to reward artificial intelligence models that contribute useful outputs to a distributed network. Bittensor uses the digital token TAO to reward participants that run machine learning models and verify their quality.
General Tensor said its infrastructure allows the firm to generate TAO tokens at a cost far below purchasing them directly on open markets. The startup said optimized hardware and operational systems allow production costs roughly forty times lower than acquiring tokens through standard buy-and-hold strategies.
The company was founded in early 2024 under the name General TAO Ventures and focuses on three core activities across the Bittensor network. These include operating mining hardware, running validation nodes that evaluate model outputs and launching specialized subnets that focus on individual AI tasks.
Bittensor has grown rapidly during the past year as interest in decentralized artificial intelligence infrastructure increased. According to network data and industry reports, the ecosystem now hosts more than 120 active subnets designed for tasks including code generation, computer vision analysis and confidential computing workloads.
Validators on the network evaluate the performance of participating models and distribute token rewards based on quality scores. The mechanism, known as proof of intelligence consensus, seeks to align incentives around model usefulness rather than raw computing power.
Network activity has expanded sharply since late 2025. Industry research cited by Bittensor participants shows the number of daily active miners has reached roughly 15,000 machines worldwide. Subnet tokens collectively represent more than a quarter of the overall TAO market capitalization.
General Tensor said part of the new capital will be used to acquire additional GPU hardware and expand validator clusters across multiple regions. The company also plans to fund incubation programs for new Bittensor subnets focused on specialized AI services.
Executives said the startup will also continue developing decentralized finance tools that allow participants to stake or lend TAO tokens generated from mining operations.
The company said engineering headcount will expand as it scales data center capacity and launches additional services tied to decentralized AI infrastructure.
