⭐️ YZi Labs has announced an investment in Vana, a crypto/AI startup focused on data ownership. The amount of the investment has not been disclosed to date. Binance co-founder CZ will be an advisor to Vana.
Today, the price of VANA has seen a sharp increase of over 25% after the announcement.
⭐️ YZi Labs' investment in Vana closed in January 2025
Anna Kazaluszkas, co-founder of Vana, said the investment closed last month, with YZi Labs as the sole investor.
So far, there are no details on the structure of the post-investment evaluation round.
This new investment comes after Vana launched its mainnet and token in December 2024.
The VANA token saw an increase in price today.
VANA is up over 25%
At the time of writing, VANA is trading at $7.78, up about 25% for the day. The coin has a market capitalization of over $234 million.
Before the announcement, VANA was trading at nearly $6, and the coin's price rose over 16% following it, reaching $8.1 and a market capitalization of over $244 million.
Apart from YZi Labs, other notable previous investors in Vana include Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures and Polychain Capital.
⭐️What is Vana?
Vana is a San Francisco-based crypto/AI startup founded in 2021 by Kazlauskas and Arthur "Art" Abal, who met in a course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the common goal of accelerating AI and enabling global user participation in new digital economies.
Data Ownership
Vana's L1 is focused on data ownership and allows users to:
They can add their data to Data DAOs
Earn rewards
Retain ownership in AI models built from their contributions
Data DAOs, central to Vana's vision
Data DAOs are a priority for Vana's vision of user-owned AI.
Such entities place user groups in direct control of their data and data consent around specific use cases that can be leveraged by the organization to train AI models.
What's next for Vana?
After securing this recent round of funding, Vana's plans include the following:
• Expanding its DataDAO ecosystem
• Helping launch data tokens for more than 16 DataDAOs
• Attract more data contributors
•Onboarding multiple DataDAOs
• The financial expansion of data beyond crypto into areas such as finance, social media, health and mobility.
