Binance led the investment and raised a total of US$43 million. Why has Sahara AI become a must-do project in 2025?

The high-profile AI track star project Sahara AI has officially launched the first phase of the test network - the data service platform. More than 10,000 early contributors were screened from 780,000 applicants. The whitelist competition is fierce. Why did Sahara AI receive a total of US$43 million in financing led by Polychain, Binance Labs, and Pantera Capital? Today we’ll take a look at how Sahara AI is different.

1. What is the mission of Sahara AI?

Sahara AI is a decentralized AI blockchain platform that aims to revolutionize the development, deployment and monetization of AI assets (including AI models, data sets, intelligent agents, etc.) through the first AI asset concept and proprietary infrastructure. . Whether they are professional developers, entrepreneurs, or ordinary AI enthusiasts, they can easily build or deploy personalized AI products based on the Sahara AI platform, and obtain actual benefits by contributing data, developing models, or deploying AI assets.

This unique design not only lowers the entry barrier for AI, but also builds a more democratic and fair AI collaborative ecosystem, allowing every participant to share the dividends of industry growth.

In short, Sahara AI is an AI public chain oriented to "AI development" and "AI data/model assetization", allowing users to co-create infrastructure and obtain actual value through data annotation from the first day.

2. Why is Sahara AI important?

Traditionally, opportunities to influence AI development have been limited to developers. But with Sahara AI, anyone can participate in and directly impact the AI ​​ecosystem, helping build a new generation of AI that is more equitable and user-centered.

As AI technology advances, its data requirements become more and more complex. Tasks that once involved labeling objects or simple classification have evolved into nuanced processes such as sentiment annotation, multimodal data alignment, and curating domain-specific datasets. These tasks require forethought, expertise, and precision to ensure high-quality results. The Sahara AI data services platform is designed to address these challenges by leveraging a globally diversified, decentralized labeling machine pool. By contributing knowledge, users will help lay the foundation for a fairer, user-centered AI ecosystem, while also receiving rewards.

Developers can access trusted models and data sets through Sahara AI, and annotate and optimize data sets to speed up development and ensure high-quality data input.

3.Team members

The core team of Sahara AI is composed of senior experts from the AI ​​and Web3 industries, with past resumes including Stanford University, University of Southern California, University of California, Berkeley, AI2, Microsoft, Binance, Stability AI, Google, Protocol Labs and Avalanche, etc. Team members integrate these cross-domain rich experiences into the design and development of Sahara AI, laying a solid technical and strategic foundation for the platform.

The founding team includes:

• Sean Ren (@xiangrenNLP): Professor of AI at the University of Southern California and Chairman of the Viterbi Center. He has a profound academic background and experience in AI technology research.
• Tyler Zhou (@tz_sahara): Former investment director of Binance Labs, he has a deep understanding and insight into the blockchain ecosystem and Web3 investment.

4. Partners

Sahara AI has not only received support from institutional investors, but also received support and guidance from leaders in the AI ​​industry and academia, including Laksh Vaaman Sehgal, Vice Chairman of Motherson Group, Rohan Taori, scientist at Anthropic, the development agency for Claude's large language model, and Nous Research Associates Vipul Prakash, CEO of Teknium and Together AI

Midjourney founding member Elvis Zhang.

5. Financing situation

This year, it received US$43 million in financing led by Pantera Capital, Binance Labs, and Polychain Capital, including corporate strategic investment from Samsung and Thailand’s Siam Bank.

6. How to participate

Sahara currently issues Sahara Points (SP) to users as rewards for testnet tasks. The mainnet is expected to be launched in the third quarter of 2025, so there will be enough time to accumulate points.

Step 1: Join the waitlist

Season 1 is now live, and users who have been whitelisted can start the mission. Friends who do not have a whitelist can register and apply for a whitelist immediately.

https://hi.saharalabs.ai/get-started

Step 2: Select a task

After obtaining the whitelist, enter the platform https://app.saharalabs.ai

Choose tasks that match your interests and expertise, and explore a variety of data tasks in the creator economy, games, science, trade, and more.

Step 3: Apply for tasks

Each task listing provides a comprehensive overview, including a clear description of the work involved, rewards offered, and estimated difficulty level. Certain tasks require taking a short, task-specific qualification exam to confirm that data providers have the appropriate expertise, ensuring that all platform contributors deliver work to the highest standards. You are only eligible to take the exam once for each task, and you cannot retake the exam once you fail. This reflects the platform’s high standards for data quality. It can be seen that the Sahara team is really controlling the quality of the data, rather than chasing the wind and feeding invalid data. Currently, more than 35 technological innovation companies and research institutions are using Sahara AI, including Microsoft, Amazon, MIT, Motherson Group and Snapchat.

Step 4: Contribute knowledge

Tag, annotate, or review data. User contributions will directly improve the quality and reliability of data sets and help build smarter AI systems. For example, when I was doing this task about Defi Influencers, I filled in the tweets, recommendation reasons, and representative tweets of the influencers I thought were excellent. If the Influencers I recommend are the same as everyone else, then I will split the reward equally with everyone else. In this way, the platform incentivizes users to provide unique data.

Step 5: Earn Sahara Points and Achievements

Earn Sahara points for each completed task, and receive additional rewards for high-quality contributions. Points and achievements will be automatically calculated using the platform’s advanced quality assurance mechanisms.

Strategy:

Provide accurate, high-quality answers on tasks to earn Base+ bonus points. Fight to be in the top 1,000 of the leaderboard by earning as much XP as possible, as these users will receive special benefits. Repeatedly low-quality participants will be gradually banned from participating to prevent the contributions of other high-quality users from being affected. The minimum accuracy threshold for submitting tasks is 15%. If 4 of the last 10 tasks are prohibited from submission, they will be suspended for 7 days. If the user is suspended three times within three months, the system will permanently prohibit the user from submitting tasks.

Sign in for 31 consecutive days and you can get an NFT record contribution after the end of the first season.

6. Summary

The value of AI data annotation lies in providing accurate training data, which is the key to improving the accuracy and performance of artificial intelligence models. Accurate annotations help the model better understand and process information, thereby performing better in practical applications. This is the core of Sahara AI. The project team stated that as Sahara AI continues to be optimized, more products with public participation will be launched in the future.

As can be seen from the above, this is a community-friendly AI project with practical value and worthy of attention.