Oryon
Portfolio indexActive · Seed · 2023
ActiveAI × crypto convergence

Ritual

CategoryAI · Compute
HeadquartersNew York
FoundersNiraj Pant, Akilesh Potti
— Overview

Ritual is building a sovereign network for AI computation — inference, training, and agent workflows — where each computation is verifiable and each model has an economic identity on-chain. The founders came from Polychain and brought a rigorous economic-design orientation to what has become an oversaturated category.

The Infernet product ships a low-latency inference marketplace with cryptographic proofs of correct model execution, letting protocols verify that an on-chain AI action was computed correctly rather than trusting a centralized endpoint.

The Ritual mainnet targets Q3 2026, with a design that lets model providers monetize compute directly through the protocol rather than through centralized cloud middlemen.

— By the numbers
20+
Protocol integrations
5.2M
Inference/day
60+
Models supported
2023
Founded
— Investment
Round
Seed 2023
Our role
Lead
Check size
$6M
Co-investors
Archetype · Robot Ventures · Balaji Srinivasan
Board seat
Tom Schmidt
— Our thesis

Verifiable AI computation as an on-chain primitive. We wrote the seed check on the conviction that this becomes the trust layer for the agent economy.

— Team
NP

Niraj Pant

CEO & Co-Founder
AP

Akilesh Potti

CTO & Co-Founder
KW

Kailin Wang

Head of Research
AA

Anish Agnihotri

Head of Engineering
— Timeline
  1. 2023Founded by Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti
  2. Q3 2023Oryon seed round
  3. Q3 2024Infernet mainnet integrations
  4. Q3 2026Full mainnet target
— Latest update

Infernet in production for 20+ protocol integrations. Mainnet targeting Q3 2026.

— In the press

Ritual is the closest thing we have to a serious economic design for verifiable AI.

The Block, 2025