Today we are excited to announce that OSS Capital has led the $10.5M Series A of Manifold Labs. Manifold is led by Rob Myers (founding Bitensor contributor, miner and subnet designer) and James Woodman (formerly COO of the Bittensor foundation). We believe Manifold is one of the most important Bittensor ecosystem startups, for a few reasons:
- Their significant contributions to the evolution and development of the Bittensor protocol from early design work on Subnets (launched in late 2023) to more recent work like dTAO (dynamic TAO, released in February 2025), and future protocol upgrades like eTAO (expressive TAO, in the works now – enabling further expression of emission granularity by Subnet owners – built in collaboration with Latent).
- Early open source contributions to Bittensor core and more recent open standards like Epistula.
- Pioneering the category of permissionless compute incentives on Bittensor through the design and launch of Subnet 4: Targon (registered and launched in early October 2023, one of the first few Subnets launched on Bittensor).
What is Targon?
Targon is the world’s first and leading Confidential AI Cloud – live on Bittensor’s decentralized mainnet, permissionlessly incentivized (with > $60M / year in incentive) across 1,500+ H200s and growing rapidly, serving > 20 billion paid inference tokens daily. Targon has delivered pioneering compute incentives through the enablement of cutting-edge AI infrastructure that leverages Confidential Compute (CC) and Protected pcie (PPCIE) – unlocking verifiable and trustworthy execution of training, inference and tuning workloads.
Here’s some snippets from the latest Targon update:
“At its core, Bittensor is a marketplace of digital commodities. These commodities are powering the AI revolution, and properly incentivizing their production is of vital importance. In our view, compute is the most important commodity of the AI revolution, no different from the importance of electricity during the Second Industrial Revolution. Today’s compute owners are highly capital inefficient (see Lambda Labs’ $500M debt facility, rumored 15% interest rate), and we believe Targon can play an important role in reducing many of the inefficiencies that exist today. By allocating capital more efficiently, the world will have more compute and therefore more AI abundance.” … “If we opened a gas station and cut our prices to $0, we would expect a line of cars that stretched further than the eye could see. Would this be a good way to gain loyal customers? Not in our view. We would expect these customers to quickly leave us as soon as we raised our prices in line with peers. This is what happens in commodity markets, and we do not expect compute to behave any differently over the long run. Therefore, printing TAO tokens to perform free inference on other companies’ models is not overly interesting to us. It is important from a load testing perspective, but Targon does not plan on using our sacred emissions in this way. Instead, we are focused on building enterprise-grade solutions for companies looking to adopt AI.”
Finally, we are blessed and honored to be joined by the following industry legends:
- Ram Shriram, Founding board member (longest standing) and angel investor in Google (now Alphabet)
- Tobi Lütke, Co-founder and CEO of Shopify
- Zachary Smith, Former co-founder of Packet, acquired by Equinix, board of Servers.com
- Logan Kilpatrick, Group PM of Google DeepMind AI
- Jacob Steeves, Co-founder of Bittensor, and Founder of Affine (Subnet 120)
- Ala Shaabana, Co-founder of Bittensor and co-founder of Crucible Labs
- DCG, largest Bitcoin miners in America and pioneering investor + operator in the crypto industry