PRIVATE · AI EXECUTION

Ritual

Ritual is a 2023-founded attempt to make model inference something a contract can call, with a proof, instead of a private API key.

You are deciding whether to join a small research company whose last clearly announced round is years behind the postings, on a product that is still easier to describe than to run in production.

The company you would actually join

Blockchain Lab analysis

Public reporting and the employer’s own releases. Not a relationship with Blockchain Lab. Not a credit opinion.

Founded: 2023
Base: Distributed. No single headquarters is stated on the roles we store.
Status: Private. No token price, circulating supply, or revenue is treated as a fact in this brief.
People: A January 2025 secondary profile put the team near 30. That number is not current headcount.

The technical bet is specific. A blockchain does not run a large model inside the EVM. Ritual's public design inserts a coprocessor: specialised nodes execute a model, then return an output a contract can accept. Infernet is the oracle-shaped version of that idea. The chain, if and when it is the production system, is where stateful precompiles, parallel execution, and heterogeneous workloads are supposed to live. That is why the open roles are not 'AI engineer' in the application sense. They are client, networking, contract-library, and validator roles.

The corporate fact pattern is thinner than the technical writing. One priced round is public. A second is a database row. Several of the Greenhouse records this desk stores were last updated in 2024 or early 2025 and were still listed on 6 October 2026. A listing that has not moved in over a year can be a real job, a forgotten req, or a role whose team no longer matches the text. Confirm the hiring manager is alive to the req before you prepare.

There is also a founder-specific item a candidate should not learn about in week three. In July 2024, reporting said Polychain was investigating Niraj Pant over an alleged financial relationship with portfolio company Eclipse during his time at the firm. This brief found the allegation in secondary coverage and did not find a public finding, settlement, or exoneration. Ask. It is not a verdict, and it is not optional colour.

Founders

Niraj Pant

Co-founder

Previously an investor at Polychain. Contemporaneous coverage credits him with early involvement around projects including EigenLayer and Solana. He is the public face of the round Archetype led.

Akilesh Potti

Co-founder

Described in the November 2023 funding coverage as a quant and builder who had worked at Palantir. The pairing is investor-plus-operator, not two protocol engineers from the same client team.

What the company sells

Infernet

The first product described in public writing: a way for a contract to request an off-chain model run and a proof, rather than a price feed.

Ritual Chain

The execution layer in the company's own framing: stateful precompiles and heterogeneous compute, including AI workloads, on top of Ethereum-client ideas.

Developer path

Frameworks, local environments, and the accelerator language (Altar, Realm) used to pull application teams toward the chain.

Capital

Priced capital we will stand behind

$25m in Nov 2023

Lead investor's own post.

Later round

Not confirmed

A 2025 Series A appears in Preqin only.

Revenue

Not disclosed

No public accounts.

Last priced valuation

Not disclosed

The $25m round did not publish a post-money figure we will repeat.

8 Nov 2023
Seed, announced by the lead
$25 million
Archetype posted that it was leading Ritual's $25 million round. Blockworks called it a seed. Named participants in that coverage include Accomplice and Robot Ventures. Preqin also lists dao5, Anagram, Hack VC, and Dialectic. Some later blogs mislabel this round a Series A.
March 2025
Series A, database-reported
$25 million, unconfirmed here
Preqin records a further $25 million with Accel, Avra, Hypersphere, and Polychain as new names, plus returning funds. This dossier did not find a Ritual press release for that round. Treat it as a database entry until the company confirms it.

What should change your mind

Runway and round status are not something you can read in a filing. Private company, one confirmed round.
Mainnet, token, and fee switch are not facts this dossier will assert. The job text sometimes says mainnet. That is the employer's word. Ask what is actually in production.
Stale reqs. The smart-contract posting was last updated on the board on 24 July 2024.
The category is crowded and narrative-heavy. A coprocessor that cannot show a paid workload is a research project with a payroll.

Ask them

Which round is the company actually operating on, and is the March 2025 Series A closed?
What is live: Infernet, a testnet, a mainnet, a token? Who pays for inference today?
Why has this specific req not been updated, and who would you report to?
What is the public status of the Polychain / Eclipse matter?
Is the role worldwide remote, or remote inside a list of countries the posting never names?

Sources

If a figure is not in those sources, it is not in this brief on purpose.

Open roles on this desk

Smart Contract Engineer
The seat that would own Ritual's open-source contract libraries — if the req, last touched on 24 July 2024, is still a team and not a leftover.
Remote · board 2024-07-24
Core Protocol Engineer
A client engineer for stateful precompiles and parallel execution — the hardest seat Ritual has posted, and the one that only matters if the chain is a real roadmap.
Remote · board 2025-01-03
Distributed Systems Engineer
The networking seat: specialised nodes, consensus, and the observability that tells you the fleet is lying.
Remote · board 2025-01-03
Developer Experience Engineer
The person who has to make Ritual feel like Foundry. High leverage, and the first role blamed when nobody builds.
Remote · board 2025-01-03
Validator Engineer
An operator's engineer: bare metal, upgrades, snapshots, and the Discord where staking either stays alive or doesn't.
Remote · board 2025-08-06