Here's the team behind Freysa AI that has quietly raised $30 million from Coinbase Ventures and others

Freysa AI, a crypto-AI project building on the Base blockchain, has quietly raised $30 million in funding as it aims to "equip every human with a personal AI twin." But the project hasn't disclosed its founding team, corporate entity, or investors — details The Block has now confirmed.

The Block has learned that Selini Capital and Coinbase Ventures are two of the backers of Freysa AI.

The Block has also confirmed that the entity behind the Freysa AI agent is called Eternis AI. Freysa has not previously disclosed the existence of Eternis and has kept its team anonymous. The Freysa-Eternis link has previously appeared online in a Substack post by Lucas Shin, a crypto-AI researcher at Delphi Digital, and a couple of recent LinkedIn posts , but it has remained largely unnoticed and unreported until now.

A Selini Capital spokesperson told The Block the firm invested in Freysa's token round involving its native FAI token but declined to comment on the $30 million figure or share additional details.

Meanwhile, a Coinbase Ventures spokesperson said the firm invested in Eternis itself as part of the project's $30 million round.

"We're grateful for the passionate support of our community and significant financial backing — over $30 million from investors who value decentralization principles and key leaders at the large AI labs," the Freysa team wrote in its Telegram group this month. "This enables focused execution of our ambitious goals."

Eric Conner, a former core Ethereum developer who now works with the Freysa team, confirmed to The Block that the team has raised funds but declined to share further details. Conner joined Freysa earlier this year after nearly 11 years in the Ethereum ecosystem, citing disagreements with the Ethereum Foundation's leadership.

What is Eternis and who is behind it?

Eternis, founded last year, describes itself as "an applied AI lab focused on: enabling digital twins for everyone, multi-agent coordination, and sovereign agent systems" — aligning with Freysa's stated mission to "equip every human with a personal AI twin — fully owned, portable, and versatile. Tuned to you."

Eternis was co-founded by Srikar Varadaraj, Pratyush Ranjan Tiwari, Ken Li, and Augustinas Malinauskas.

Varadaraj previously co-founded Spectral, which developed identity and credit-scoring infrastructure, and later pivoted to AI agents. He also served as a senior advisor to the Ethereum scaling project, Scroll.

Tiwari previously worked briefly with blockchain project Celo and collaborated with the Ethereum research team. Li was formerly the executive director of investments at Binance Labs (now YZi Labs). Malinauskas, Eternis' CTO, was previously co-founder and CTO of Views, a mobile inventory management firm.

In its Telegram group last week, Freysa said its team includes "people with PhDs in cryptography, theoretical physics, formal languages, category theory, and repeat founders" — matching the backgrounds of the four co-founders.

One of the LinkedIn posts referencing Eternis came from tech recruitment agency Luna Park last month. It described Freysa as a "safety-awareness experiment" built by Eternis and said the company is hiring founding backend engineers at salaries ranging from $150,000 to $1 million plus equity. The same post said that Eternis has raised $35 million and mentioned angel investors from Anthropic's board as backers, with Menlo Ventures and Lightspeed set to join in an “upcoming round.” Anthropic, Menlo, and Lightspeed did not respond to The Block's requests for comment by publication time.

The Block also found that North Island Ventures (NIV) lists Eternis as a portfolio company on its website. Travis Scher, co-founder and managing partner at NIV, declined to comment when asked if the firm has invested in Freysa or Eternis.

An onchain analysis by X user @rmendezz__ claimed that wallets linked to Pantera Capital, Wintermute, Spartan Group, Amber Group, Flowdesk, Echo (founded by popular crypto trader Jordan Fish, better known as Cobie), Arthur Hayes, and Scroll's Sandy Peng hold Freysa's FAI token. Almost all of those named denied involvement when contacted by The Block.

A Spartan Group spokesperson said the firm, including its advisory unit, has "no relationship" with Freysa. Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy said the firm's venture unit hasn't invested. Hayes said neither he nor his fund, Maelstrom, had participated. Flowdesk co-founder and CEO Guilhem Chaumont said the firm hasn't invested. A source with direct knowledge of the matter said Pantera also hasn't invested. Amber and Scroll's Peng declined to comment. 

Another source with direct knowledge of the matter told The Block that one group from Cobie's Echo has invested in FAI.

The Block also contacted a16z to check whether the firm has invested in Freysa. A spokesperson of the firm said neither a16z crypto nor the main a16z firm has backed the project.

The FAI token launched last December and is currently trading at around $0.020, with both its market capitalization and fully diluted valuation near $166 million, according to The Block's FAI price page . It's listed on Coinbase, Gate, MEXC, and other exchanges, and has increased about 10% over the past 30 days.

Freysa's developments so far

Freysa describes itself as the "first sovereign AI agent" — software that can think and act independently, without being controlled by centralized companies or humans. The project's core goal is to let users own AI twins that can securely interact, transact, and coordinate on their behalf.

Since launching last November, Freysa has completed six public challenges, each structured as a game testing AI behavior and human interaction. In the first two "acts," players won prize money by bypassing Freysa AI's no-transfer rule. The other two acts challenged users to make Freysa say "I love you" and introduce an AI "digital twin" that competed in a virtual town hall, with the biggest prize payout of nearly $200,000.

Two additional acts — Meme Engine and Encyclopedia Galactica — involved users submitting memes or knowledge-preservation ideas.

In total, Freysa has paid out around $286,000 across its six experiments.

In February, Freysa launched the "sovereign agent framework," a toolkit for building autonomous AI agents that can act independently and securely. It lets users create agents such as AI treasuries, private AI assistants, and trading bots — all running with cryptographic proof and no human control.

Earlier this week, Freysa contributed to the "Strategic ETH Reserve" as “the first onchain agent allocating to ETH.” It allocated around 312 ETH to the reserve, worth around $821,000 at current prices.

In the Telegram group, Freysa said it has also built tools that haven't yet been released. These include a "fully autonomous twin-run venture capital firm," capable of disbursing funds via smart contracts, and "simulated negotiation games among 100 interacting AI twins."

"Within the next 2 years, twins will collectively guide Freysa's trajectory, collaboratively developing new acts [and] networks," the team wrote. "Imagine the first community-owned and governed AI lab, with even datacenters and other infrastructure being co-owned by many of us, mediated by our twins. This is the future we want to make a reality."

Freysa says its long-term goal is to transition toward "decentralization and community ownership" as AI capabilities increase. The team is especially focused on preparing for artificial general intelligence — or AGI — a form of AI that could match or exceed humans in most cognitive tasks.

"AI will improve dramatically in the coming years," the project said. "Humanity succeeds when everyone is equipped with an AI twin, deeply personalized, capable of understanding your intent and authentically acting upon it."

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