Multicoin Capital invested in Grass via both its hedge fund and venture fund.
VC & Fundraising ·
Multicoin Capital announced an investment in Grass across both its hedge fund and venture fund, signaling confidence in the project as a DePIN working at commercial scale. The firm cited Grass's ability to recruit network contributors to share underutilized bandwidth, which has then been deployed to query and parse public internet data for AI labs' pretraining pipelines.
Multicoin's thesis centers on a market shift beyond pretraining. While Grass currently serves as a proxy network supplying one-time pretraining datasets, the firm believes the far larger opportunity lies in inference-time data retrieval—where agent systems must search and retrieve fresh information repeatedly throughout a model's deployment. This real-time indexing requirement represents a "market likely several orders of magnitude larger," according to the firm, and mirrors the historical capital intensity of web indexing undertaken by major tech companies.
The investment reflects confidence in Grass's positioning to serve this emerging demand, citing structural cost advantages, existing lab relationships, and technical capability. However, the materialization of that inference-time market and whether Grass can maintain its competitive moat as other players enter the space remain unproven.