AI DePIN Startups Mirai and Grotto AI Raise $10M Each

- Mirai's $10 million seed round was led by Uncork Capital, with angel investment from notable figures including Snowflake co-founder Marcin Żukowski, ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski, and Coinbase board member Gokul Rajaram. - The startup was founded by Dima Shvets and Alexey Moiseenkov, the respective co-founders of viral AI apps Reface and Prisma, bringing experience in scaling consumer AI applications with hundreds of millions of users. - Grotto AI's seed round was led by ICONIQ Capital, an investor in high-profile AI companies like Anthropic. The company's founders, Nick Deveau and Ben Epstein, previously led the development of core technology at EvolutionIQ, which was acquired in a $730 million exit. - Grotto AI is targeting the estimated $500 billion in property value lost annually due to vacancy and is already deployed with operators like Weidner Apartment Homes, which manages over 70,000 units. - Mirai is building a proprietary, Rust-based inference engine that it claims improves AI model performance on Apple Silicon by up to 37% without altering the model's quality, aiming to reduce reliance on costly cloud-based processing. - The broader DePIN sector generated $72 million in on-chain revenue in 2025 on a market cap of roughly $10 billion, with private funding for early-stage startups in the space reaching approximately $1 billion. - A World Economic Forum report projected the DePIN market could reach $3.5 trillion by 2028, with the convergence of AI and blockchain being a key driver of this anticipated growth. - Solana has emerged as a leading blockchain for DePIN projects, hosting prominent networks like Helium and Render, with AI-related applications currently dominating the sector by market capitalization.