SVTR 硅谷科技评论SVTR
← Database

NEAR Protocol

NEAR was founded in 2017 by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov, originally as Near.ai, an AI program-synthesis startup, before pivoting in 2018 to build NEAR Protocol, a sharded Layer-1 blockchain whose mainnet launched in October 2020.

Request an introWebsite ↗
ModelsAI Agents
📍 Zug · Western EuropeFounded 2017

About

NEAR was founded in 2017 by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov, originally as Near.ai, an AI program-synthesis startup, before pivoting in 2018 to build NEAR Protocol, a sharded Layer-1 blockchain whose mainnet launched in October 2020. The ecosystem is stewarded by the non-profit NEAR Foundation in Zug, Switzerland, alongside NEAR AI, an independently run AI company pursuing 'User-Owned AI' — private inference on trusted execution environments (NEAR AI Cloud) and verifiable AI agents.

Capital graph

⬇
NEAR ProtocolIllia PolosukhinIllia PolosukhinAlexander SkidanovAlexander Skidanov
CompanyInvestorFounders / teamCo-investment (thicker arc = more shared deals, ×N marks the count)Bigger circle = stronger signal (activity / coverage / interest) · ⛶ fullscreen · scroll / pinch to zoom · hover to highlight · drag nodes · click a node to open its profile

Founders / core team

Illia Polosukhin联合创始人Alexander Skidanov联合创始人

Similar companies· Same sector “AI Agents”

Cognee

AI Agents

Cognee is an open-source AI memory platform (built by Topoteretes UG) that gives AI agents persistent, long-term memory across sessions via a self-hosted knowledge graph and vector search engine. Its ECL pipeline (Extract, Cognify, Load) ingests data from 38+ sources and structures it into a queryable graph, letting agents recall context and give cited answers.

ClawMax

AI Agents

ClawMax is an orchestration layer built on the open-source OpenClaw framework, offering visual agent and team management, workflow DAG views, execution tracing, a template library and a skill marketplace for running large fleets of OpenClaw AI agents, delivered as cloud, on-premise or enterprise deployments.

Photon

AI Agents

Photon is a San Francisco-based infrastructure company that offers a unified API, extensible channel framework (Spectrum), CLI and observability suite for building and operating AI agents inside messaging surfaces users already use — iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS/RCS, email and voice — as an alternative to standalone mobile apps. It grew out of an open-source iMessage bot built by its founders and launched a managed subscription platform in April 2026; customers include Corgi Insurance, Boardy, Ditto and Rho.

PromptQL

AI Agents

PromptQL is the AI data-agent product and public brand of Hasura, Inc., the company founded in 2017 by Tanmai Gopal and Rajoshi Ghosh and known for the open-source Hasura GraphQL Engine (valued at about $1B after its 2022 Series C). PromptQL is a multiplayer team AI with shared threads and shared context that runs accurate natural-language analytics and automation over enterprise databases, APIs and SaaS data, with permissions enforced at the data layer.

Observer AI

AI Agents

Observer AI is an open-source project by Roy Medina that lets users build local 'micro-agents' which watch a chosen input (screen, camera, microphone, clipboard) through local or cloud LLMs and trigger notifications or actions (SMS, WhatsApp, Discord, email, logging) on conditional rules. It runs privacy-first and on-device by default, with an optional hosted web app at app.observer-ai.com, and has 1,600+ GitHub stars.

Monid

AI Agents

Monid is a San Francisco-based agent-native tool router and marketplace, positioned as "OpenRouter for agent tools." Launched in April 2026, it lets AI agents discover, compare and pay per call for third-party tools and APIs through one integration and a single prepaid balance, with no per-vendor subscriptions and failed calls billed at zero. By September 2026 its catalog exceeded 1,700 tools from 55+ providers and it had processed over 4 million agent transactions; its core engine is open-sourced under MIT.

Investors that may fit

Y Combinator

11 AI Agents deals in the last 24 months · 1 in 西欧

Request intro →

General Catalyst

6 AI Agents deals in the last 24 months · 1 in 西欧

Request intro →

Antler

3 AI Agents deals in the last 24 months · 3 in 西欧

Request intro →

Creandum

2 AI Agents deals in the last 24 months · 1 in 西欧

Request intro →

Air Street Capital

2 AI Agents deals in the last 24 months · 2 in 西欧

Request intro →

Entrepreneur First

2 AI Agents deals in the last 24 months · 1 in 西欧

Request intro →

Ranked by each firm’s deals in this sector over the last 24 months, weighted by nearby stage and shared geography. Indicative only — no rating judgment.

Want to reach NEAR Protocol — for capital, customers, or partnership? Send a short request; SVTR reviews it and brokers the intro, with both sides verified before you meet.

Request an intro to this companySubscribe to Signal