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General Tensor, a vertically integrated infrastructure operator on Bittensor, has raised $5 million across oversubscribed pre-seed and seed funding rounds as investor interest grows in the production layer of the emerging decentralized AI economy.
The seed round was anchored by Good Morning Holdings, led by Lok Lee and backed by Goldman Sachs. The funding builds on a December 2024 pre-seed round led by Lvna Capital, with participation from Digital Currency Group, X Ventures, Proof of Talk, and Outliers Fund.
The Toronto-based company recently rebranded from General TAO Ventures to General Tensor, a move the team says better reflects its expanding role across multiple layers of the Bittensor ecosystem. While the name has changed, the company says its strategy and operating model remain the same.
Over the past year, General Tensor has focused on building end-to-end infrastructure across the network, expanding from a three-person team to 14 employees while operating across mining, validation, subnets, and application development.
That expansion has translated into growing operational responsibility inside the ecosystem. The company has taken ownership of Subnet 35, achieved top mining performance on two of the network’s five largest subnets, and acquired the RoundTable21 validator while retaining Wild Sage Labs as its validator-as-a-service operator.
General Tensor has also incubated Trishool (Subnet 23) alongside Kardashev and Yuma Group, partnered with Vanta Trading to launch Subnet 35’s Cartha alongside 0x Markets, and helped build Rubicon Bridge in partnership with Chainlink.
The company’s model centers on producing TAO directly through infrastructure participation rather than purchasing the token on the open market. By vertically integrating mining, validation, and subnet operations, General Tensor says it can generate TAO at roughly 40 times the cost efficiency of simply buying and holding the asset.
“Operational alpha outperforms passive accumulation,” General Tensor CEO Mike Grantis said in a statement. “We generate TAO at a fraction of market cost. We are building the infrastructure that produces it.”
Investors backing the company say the approach offers exposure to the operational layer of decentralized AI networks, which is becoming an increasingly important part of the Bittensor ecosystem as it matures.
“When we led the pre-seed round in 2024, decentralized AI had enormous potential, but the infrastructure to support it was still early,” said Allan Cassis, founder and CEO of Lvna Capital. “General Tensor stood out because they were building the systems required to make the network function.”
General Tensor said the new capital will be used to expand validator operations, accelerate the development of high-performance subnet infrastructure, and scale consumer-facing applications built on top of the Bittensor network.
With institutional backing now supporting infrastructure operators inside decentralized AI networks, the company is positioning itself as a long-term participant in what it describes as the emerging production layer of the Bittensor economy.
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