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Pi Network Ventures, the investment arm of the Pi Network ecosystem, has announced its first-ever strategic investment, backing OpenMind, a company developing a decentralized operating system (OS) for robots.
The move marks a major milestone for Pi Network Ventures, signaling its entry into the robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) space.
According to a statement released on Wednesday, the investment will connect Pi Network’s global decentralized node ecosystem with OpenMind’s robotics infrastructure creating what the company describes as a “shared computational and economic framework for humans and machines.”
OpenMind is building OM1, a decentralized OS designed to unify how robots perceive, reason, and act across different hardware platforms. On top of OM1 sits FABRIC, a secure protocol that allows robots to identify, verify, and collaborate both physically and digitally.
“Our mission has always been to create open infrastructure for intelligence that exists in the real world, not just in the cloud,” — Boyuan Chen, Chief Technology Officer, OpenMind. “Working with Pi Network helps us extend that idea across both robotics and decentralized computing.”
The investment represents Pi Network Ventures’ broader ambition to expand beyond blockchain payments into advanced decentralized technologies that can redefine how digital economies function.
Ahead of the investment, Pi Network Ventures and OpenMind conducted a proof-of-concept experiment testing distributed AI processing using Pi’s global node network. Over 350,000 active Pi Nodes participated, offering unused computing resources for OpenMind’s image recognition models.
The experiment validated that Pi’s decentralized infrastructure could support real-world AI workloads, effectively transforming it into a large-scale, peer-powered AI cluster. Node operators earned Pi tokens for their contributions, showcasing the potential of distributed AI training and inference without relying on centralized cloud providers like AWS or Google Cloud.
The collaboration aims to integrate Pi Network Ventures’ decentralized economy with OpenMind’s robotics systems, allowing robots to access real-time computational resources and engage in verifiable on-chain transactions.
“This partnership demonstrates how blockchain can drive the next wave of AI and robotics innovation,” — Dr. Nikhil Goel, Head of Research, Blockchain Robotics Lab. “By decentralizing compute power, Pi Network Ventures is positioning itself at the core of the machine economy.”
Such integration could also enable cross-network computation, where robotic systems and decentralized applications (dApps) interact through tokenized incentives. According to Pi Network’s technical documentation, its ecosystem of over 47 million users and thousands of active nodes makes it one of the largest decentralized infrastructures suitable for large-scale computation.
Pi Network Ventures’ support for OpenMind comes on the heels of OpenMind’s $20 million funding round in August 2025, led by Pantera Capital with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Ribbit Capital, and Topology. That round established OpenMind as a pioneer in open-source robotics infrastructure, aiming to break away from centralized cloud AI dependency.
The company plans to use the new partnership to further develop OM1 and FABRIC, refine pilot deployments, and onboard new partners in the coming year. By leveraging Pi Network Ventures’ decentralized computing power, OpenMind hopes to make robotics systems both more autonomous and more transparent.
In its official announcement, Pi Network Ventures emphasized that the collaboration represents “a major step toward building decentralized AI systems that align with human values and operate within open, verifiable frameworks.”
“Pi Network Ventures is building bridges between decentralized economies and the future of intelligent machines,” — Elaine Zhang, Investment Director, Pi Network Ventures. “Our investment in OpenMind highlights our belief that the next phase of Web3 will be powered not just by humans — but by machines contributing to open networks.”
The implications of this partnership extend far beyond robotics. With Pi Network Ventures acting as a bridge between blockchain and AI, the collaboration introduces new economic models for decentralized computation. In theory, robots running OM1 could pay for compute access or data validation using tokens from the Pi ecosystem forming a self-sustaining machine-to-machine economy.
Such a system aligns with growing global interest in decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), where hardware resources like sensors, bandwidth, or compute power are incentivized through blockchain-based rewards. The integration of Pi’s network with OpenMind’s robotics operating system could make this concept a reality at unprecedented scale.
As Pi Network Ventures continues to expand its investment portfolio, the move signals a larger strategy to position itself as a cornerstone in the emerging AI-blockchain convergence where digital intelligence, economic autonomy, and decentralized participation intersect.
