Fortytwo Secures $2.3M in Pre-Seed Funding Led by Big Brain Holdings
MOUNTAIN VIEW, California, March 6th, 2025, Chainwire
Fortytwo, a decentralized AI network designed to scale intelligence beyond centralized infrastructure, has raised $2.3 million in a pre-seed funding round, led by Big Brain Holdings, with participation from CMT Digital, Escape Velocity Ventures (EV3), Chorus One, Mentat Group, and angel investors including Santiago R Santos, Keone Hon, Paul Taylor, and Comfy Capital, among others.
Fortytwo is creating a new type of inference with small language models running on everyday devices, working together to achieve scale and capability that exceed centralized AI.
By coordinating reasoning across specialized models, Fortytwo is pushing AI beyond centralized infrastructure by replacing monolithic models with networked intelligence—with swarms of AI models working together, verifying, refining, and enhancing each other’s reasoning. As new nodes join, the network scales organically, enabling high-accuracy, low-cost inference for AI applications such as coding copilots, research agents, and other use cases demanding frontier accuracy and reasoning capabilities.
The newly secured funding will accelerate the rollout of Fortytwo’s devnet and support the development of distributed multi-step reasoning, as well as further research.
“Fortytwo is offering a new path for AI scalability, allowing anyone to contribute compute power and participate in a decentralized network, moving away from the centralized, corporate-controlled AI infrastructure of today,” said Ivan Nikitin, CEO of Fortytwo.
“As more nodes join, the intelligence of our network grows, enabling a planetary-scale AI reasoning model built on community-owned models. Through swarm inference, these models work together to continuously improve, ultimately surpassing the capabilities of centralized AI in reasoning and efficiency. This funding brings us closer to realizing a future where AI is accessible, scalable, and driven by global collaboration.”
Investors backing Fortytwo see this shift as a fundamental breakthrough in AI scalability and decentralization.
”We invest in research-driven teams that take a deep technical approach to solving fundamental AI challenges.
The Fortytwo team isn’t just theorizing about AI decentralization, they’re building a network that makes decentralized AI scalability a reality with a feasible path towards cheaper and better performance than that of closed-source models.
As centralized AI reaches its limits, Fortytwo is leading the shift to a decentralized, globally distributed future, and we’re excited to support their work.” – Sam Kim, Partner at Big Brain Holdings.
“As one of the first investments from our fourth fund, we believe Fortytwo is redefining AI scalability by proving that AI doesn’t need to be bigger—it needs to be smarter,” said Sam Hallene, Investment Partner at CMT Digital. “Their swarm inference model enables AI to collaborate, verify, and refine outputs together, making it more accurate, scalable, and transparent.”
Fortytwo has launched its devnet on the Monad testnet. The company’s ongoing early adopter program, ‘Hitchhiking to AGI,’ aims to establish a foundation for decentralized AI coordination and collaboration.
About Fortytwo
Fortytwo is a decentralized AI network that introduces a new type of inference using swarms of small language models running on consumer-grade hardware to achieve scale and reasoning capabilities that exceed centralized AI. The network becomes more powerful and efficient with each new node, operating in a permissionless, transparent, and censorship-resistant manner. Fortytwo allows anyone to contribute by running a node, with node ratings recorded on the Monad blockchain for evaluation and security. Developers can access frontier AI reasoning via API or on-chain, while node operators are rewarded for their contributions.
