droppGroup, a US-based company specializing in AI and blockchain solutions, has completed a $5 million pre-seed funding round for Data Guardians Network (D-GN), a platform providing accurate and ethically sourced training data. Saudi businessman Hamoud Al-Rumayyan and the crypto firm Hub Culture led this investment.
The funding will strengthen droppGroup’s ethical AI infrastructure, already deployed with organizations such as Saudi Aramco and Cisco, while enhancing its portfolio of compliant and transparent technologies.
D-GN utilizes a decentralized contributor model with on-chain traceability and payments in Tether’s USDT, ensuring fair compensation for contributors.
How the funding will be used: With this investment, D-GN aims to expand its operations in the MENA region, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, while growing its multimodal datasets and integrating further with open-source and enterprise AI frameworks.
KEY QUOTES:
“Billions of dollars in lawsuits are hitting the AI industry because foundational models have been trained on stolen or unlicensed data. D-GN solves this industrial problem. It transforms global human input into an auditable, tokenized data engine that ethically trains, verifies and improves AI systems across voice, image and text. We took part of the round because we see this as a core pillar of the future AI stack for all our clients.”
Faisal Al Monai, Chairman of droppGroup
“When we saw Meta purchase a stake in Scale AI for around $14-15 billion, investing in D‑GN at this stage looked like a steal. We believe D-GN is the Scale AI killer. More importantly, D‑GN does it differently, upholding both ethical AI and ethical labor standards. No outsourcing to click‑farms, no gray IP zones – just transparent, auditable, fair data.”
Faisal Al Monai, Chairman of droppGroup
“As Saudi Arabia transforms into a global hub for AI and innovation, our focus must remain on building infrastructure rooted in ethics, equity and opportunity. Data Guardians Network represents a new model, one where the people who power AI are finally included in its value creation. This is not just an investment, it’s a step toward a more inclusive digital economy aligned with the Saudi Vision 2030.”
Hamoud Al-Rumayyan
“We built D-GN so that everyday people could have a stake in the future of AI, not just be the invisible labor behind it. droppGroup understands that vision deeply. This partnership gives us the fuel and the infrastructure to scale ethical data at a global level.”
Johanna Cabildo, Founder and CEO of D-GN
