Perle Labs CEO: AI requires verifiable, sovereign data infrastructure

AI agents dominated ETHDenver 2026, and amid growing interest in “agentic economies” Perle Labs says a harder question is emerging: can institutions prove what their AI systems were trained on? The startup argues that AI in regulated and high-risk environments needs a verifiable chain of custody for training data, and has raised $17.5 million to date in a round led by Framework Ventures, with CoinFund, Protagonist, HashKey and Peer VC also participating.

The company reports more than one million annotators contributing over a billion scored data points on its platform. On the sidelines of ETHDenver, CEO Ahmed Rashad—who previously held an operational leadership role at Scale AI—described Perle as a “sovereign intelligence layer for AI.” He framed sovereign as control, independence and accountability: institutions must know what their models were trained on, who validated that data, and be able to prove it.

Perle records each expert annotator contribution on-chain so that every validation is permanent and auditable.

United States, Denver

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