Ryan Li has lengthy been steeped within the worlds of each AI and crypto. He began working with AI about ten years in the past as an undergrad at UC Berkeley and has since constructed two crypto startups. That have has led him to conclude that in style AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity give rise to far too many hallucinations about crypto—and that these errors can price merchants tens of millions, if not billions, of {dollars}. That’s why he cofounded Surf, an AI platform specialised for the world of crypto.
On Wednesday, his startup introduced that it raised $15 million from Pantera Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Digital Forex Group. Li, the startup’s CEO, didn’t disclose the corporate’s valuation in an interview with Fortune.
“Surf was something that we wanted to build for ourselves, and it turns out the market loves it,” he stated. “I think Surf is the best model for crypto, and we want to make sure people trust Surf instead of relying on hallucinations from other models.”
The product launched as an invite-only service in July earlier than opening to most people in September. It has greater than 300,000 folks utilizing the platform and has generated greater than one million search outcomes, in response to the corporate. Li says that the platform can reply a spectrum of questions on crypto, from probably the most primary to probably the most technical ideas. He says that 80% of the platform’s customers are common individuals who don’t work in crypto, and the remaining 20% are from enterprise capital corporations, exchanges, and different crypto-affiliated corporations.
The startup says that it has a few million {dollars} in income and hopes to achieve $10 million by the tip of 2026. Surf generates income by charging a subscription charge, with customers paying $15 to $399 monthly on totally different tiers of the service. Folks can entry a free model through which they will solely ask a couple of questions per day. The corporate at the moment has just below 30 staff.
Li views his startup’s competitors as mainstream AI fashions like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok. The corporate says that its platform performs 4 occasions higher than ChatGPT and Grok on crypto duties, primarily based on benchmark testing it co-authored with Princeton College. Whereas ChatGPT could also be barely sooner, Surf had solutions that had been extra particular to crypto and had extra citations, primarily based on a side-by-side comparability of the 2 platforms that Li shared with Fortune.
“ChatGPT is a really good generalist, but it doesn’t know the crypto industry enough,” Li stated. “Surf is like that expert that worked in the industry for a long time by us training the model just for crypto.”
With the brand new funding, the startup plans to launch Surf 2.0, a extra superior mannequin, in February 2026.
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