MyShell, a Tokyo-based company that provides a blockchain-based decentralized artificial intelligence platform for users to create productivity apps and chatbots, announced Wednesday it has raised $11 million in early-stage funding.

The Pre-Series A round was led by Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Delphi Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Maven11 Capital, Nascent, Nomad Capital and OKX Ventures. The new funding brings the total amount raised by the company to $16.6 million.

MyShell’s platform provides creators the capability to build and deploy their own AI applications within the company’s ecosystem, which uses blockchain technology and crypto to provide an incentive for app creation. As users interact with apps, crypto tokens are generated as royalties for creators which can be bought, sold and traded.

Although the platform can be used to create productivity apps, many of the creations of users are AI companions such as AI girlfriend chatbots in the vein of feminine cartoon characters. The application layer that MyShell provides makes it easy for creators to develop their own AI chatbot that can mimic characters from anime, fiction or historical figures and act as a conversational chatbot and then deploy it on the service.

To enable users to build apps and chatbots, MyShell provides a “Workshop” product where users build AI agents using prompts, and a no-code AI workflow builder called “Makerspace” for creators. According to the company, the platform has already gained more than 1 million registered users for the chatbots and apps, with more than 50,000 creators.

“MyShell is poised to revolutionize the AI creator ecosystem,” MyShell Chief Executive Ethan Sun said. “With this new funding, we’re not just scaling our operations, we’re catalyzing a movement towards a more open, collaborative, and democratic AI landscape.”

The company said its focus on open-source and decentralized development has already led to several projects launched from the platform. These include OpenVoice, a voice cloning AI model with over 15,000 stars on GitHub; MeloTTS, an open-source text-to-speech solution that mimics the human voice; and AIlice, an open-source agent framework for AI development workflows.

The company said that it plans to use the new funding to continue development on its open-source AI foundation model, continue to work with creators to build AI agents, build an AI assets trading platform and further support the open-source community.

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