Solana DePIN Project Grass Secures $10M from Polychain and Tribe to Power AI Data Infrastructure Plans

Grass, the decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) project built on Solana, has successfully raised $10 million in a bridge round backed by Polychain Capital and Tribe Capital, according to sources familiar with the matter. The funding, primarily structured as a token purchase, positions Grass to expand its AI-driven data infrastructure and enhance its roadmap toward large-scale data accessibility.

This latest round follows Grass’s seed and Series A raises, continuing strong investor confidence from Polychain, which has participated in every funding stage so far. “Grass is redefining how companies access and utilize data at an unprecedented scale,” said Andrej Radonjic, a representative from the project. “Our technology enables users to sell unused internet bandwidth, effectively turning idle capacity into a decentralized data network.”

Grass’s platform has drawn interest from AI companies seeking new sources of high-quality training data. Traditional model training often depends on scraping search engines like Google—a method increasingly restricted by corporate firewalls. Grass aims to sidestep this bottleneck through its distributed network, enabling internet-scale web crawling for both training and inference data.

Radonjic noted that the company wasn’t actively seeking funding, but the opportunity aligned with accelerating commercial momentum. “We’ve seen strong growth in data sales to major AI labs building video and text-to-speech models,” he said. “Now, we’re preparing Grass to become core infrastructure for inference data, not just training.”

The long-term vision is ambitious: to create a decentralized ‘live context retrieval’ system, allowing AI systems to continuously access real-time web data—something centralized entities struggle to achieve due to scale limitations.

Polychain Capital partner Josh Rosenthal praised Grass’s rapid execution: “Grass exemplifies how distributed systems can outcompete Web2 incumbents. We’re thrilled to back them for the third time as they hit a critical growth inflection.”

Tribe Capital’s CEO Boris Revsin echoed similar sentiment, noting that Grass has attracted seven-figure contracts from leading AI labs since 2023. “Grass is a product leader with relentless focus on performance and revenue. That’s why we continue to double down,” he said.

Currently, Grass boasts 8.5 million monthly active users and partnerships with around 20 organizations, including nonprofits and universities. All customer payments flow into the Grass Foundation, which oversees the network and manages the GRASS token — the main vehicle for value accrual across the project’s ecosystem.

By merging decentralized networks with AI infrastructure, Grass is positioning itself as one of the most crypto-native and commercially viable players at the intersection of Web3 and AI innovation.