# Illia Polosukhin

> Illia Polosukhin is a seed investor at NEAR Protocol backing Software and Artificial Intelligence. See 27 investments, check sizes, portfolio. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: Angel Investor
- Fund: [NEAR Protocol](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/near-0565)
- Location: Mountain View, United States
- Total investments: 27
- Last investment: Aug 2025
- Lead investor: 7%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/illia-polosukhin-77b6538/
- X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/ilblackdragon
- Website: https://x.com/ilblackdragon

Illia Polosukhin is a Co-Founder at NEAR.

## Round sizes

| Stage | Round size |
| --- | --- |
| Seed | $2.5M–$10M |
| Pre-Seed | $200k–$10M |
| Series A | $30M–$33M |

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Software | 9 | 33% |
| Artificial Intelligence | 8 | 30% |
| Blockchain | 7 | 26% |
| Information Technology | 7 | 26% |
| Cryptocurrency | 4 | 15% |

42 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Seed | 14 | 52% |
| Pre-Seed | 5 | 19% |
| Series A | 2 | 7% |
| Angel | 1 | 4% |
| Grant | 1 | 4% |

8 stages tracked in total.

### Country

| Country | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| United States | 17 | 63% |
| Singapore | 1 | 4% |
| Switzerland | 1 | 4% |
| Cayman Islands | 1 | 4% |
| United Kingdom | 1 | 4% |

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Cheiron | PhnyX Lab is working under the concept of redefining biopharma workflow through AI-powered solutions. The industry celebrates breakthroughs in medicine—but behind the scenes, progress isn't slowed by science. It's hindered by fragmented data, bloated documentation, and disconnected workflows. With Cheiron, they are revolutionizing howpharma operates, turning chaos into clarity by unifying internal and external data within a single discovery platform. They are going beyond unified search to intelligent action and automation, powered by GenAI. | $4M | Seed | Aug 04, 2025 |  |
| Youlify | Youlify offers AI solutions for medical billing, denied claims investigation, and real-time financial insights. | $4.3M | Seed | Apr 16, 2025 |  |
| Fraction AI | Fraction AI is the best human-generated data for training your AI models. | $6M | Pre-Seed | Dec 18, 2024 |  |
| Lens Protocol | Lens Protocol is a composable and decentralized social network serving the Web3 community. It enables creators to build their own web3 social media platforms and accounts, giving them control over their connections with their communities and also ownership over their content. | $31M | Venture - Series Unknown | Dec 18, 2024 |  |
| Pond | Pond is a decentralized AI startup that focuses on creating a comprehensive ecosystem for training Web3 AI models. Pond's approach is quite exciting because it merges two powerful, innovative technologies: AI and Web3. | $7.5M | Seed | Nov 07, 2024 |  |
| OpenGradient | OpenGradient is a pioneering platform that enables secure execution of open-source models, employs agentic reasoning, and facilitates application deployment without permission. | $8.5M | Seed | Oct 09, 2024 |  |
| OpenGradient | OpenGradient is a leading decentralized AI platform for open-source model hosting, secure inference, agentic reasoning, and application deployment. By developing tooling and a feature-rich platform that makes developing AI workflows both secure and seamless, OpenGradient empowers developers with the ability to build in its ecosystem of intelligentand optimized AI-empowered applications. With native model hosting, permissionless composability, and secure inference execution, OpenGradient also aims to accelerate open-source AI by democratizing model ownership, improving verifiability guarantees, and promoting censorship-resistant model access.Our heterogeneous AI compute architecture (HACA) and our proprietary library NeuroML scale secure AI workflows with features like inference, agentic reasoning, statistical analysis, and more. OpenGradient also accelerates open-source innovation with a web portal and SDK for Web2 developers to leverage our AI stack without navigating blockchain complexities, while enjoying the security and composability benefits of decentralized infrastructure. | $9.5M | Seed | Oct 09, 2024 |  |
| PIN AI | PIN AI democratizes personal on-device intelligence for everyone; transform your digital footprints into your Personal Executive Assistant. | $10M | Pre-Seed | Sep 09, 2024 |  |
| Fabric Cryptography | Fabric develops a custom cryptography hardware to accelerate cryptography algorithms. The chips, whose components exclusively serve cryptographic purposes, are based on Verifiable Processing Units (VPUs) which incorporate features of GPUs and ASICs to improve the speed and cost of advanced cryptographic workloads. | $33M | Series A | Aug 19, 2024 |  |
| Hyperbolic | Hyperbolic is the open-access AI cloud made for AI developers, providing fast, affordable access to compute, inference, and AI services. | $7M | Seed | Jul 30, 2024 |  |

10 of 27 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Coinbase Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/coinbase-ventures) — VC Fund, 6 deals together
- [Foresight Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/foresight-ventures-e03b) — VC Fund, 5 deals together
- [NEAR Foundation](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/near-foundation) — VC Fund, 4 deals together
- [Symbolic Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/symbolic-capital) — VC Fund, 4 deals together
- [a16z crypto](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/a16z-crypto) — VC Fund, 3 deals together
- [CoinFund](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/coinfund) — VC Fund, 3 deals together

## About NEAR Protocol

VC Fund · San Francisco, United States

NEAR Protocol is a scalable blockchain designed to provide the performance and user experience necessary to bridge the gap to mainstream adoption of decentralized applications. Unlike other next generation blockchains, this network has been built from the ground up to be the easiest in the world for both developers and their end users while stillproviding the scalability necessary to serve those users.

5 contacts available at NEAR Protocol.

| Name | Title | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Illia Polosukhin | Co-founder | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/illia-polosukhin |
| Lauren Pfeifer | Business Operations Manager | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/lauren-pfeifer |
| Alexander Skidanov | Co-Founder | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/alexander-skidanov |
| Alexandra Breines | Marketing | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/alexandra-breines |
| Gustav Friis | Business Operations | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/gustav-friis |

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## FAQ

### What does Illia Polosukhin invest in?

Illia Polosukhin invests primarily in Software, Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain startups, most often at Seed and Pre-Seed stage. Most of the 27 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.

### What is Illia Polosukhin's check size?

Illia Polosukhin typically joins rounds of $2.5M–$10M at Seed, $200k–$10M at Pre-Seed and $30M–$33M at Series A. These ranges are 10th–90th percentile round sizes calculated from confirmed public funding rounds, so they are a realistic guide to the rounds Illia Polosukhin participates in.

### When did Illia Polosukhin last invest?

The most recent investment recorded for Illia Polosukhin closed in Aug 2025. Shizune tracks 27 investments in total for this profile, including round sizes, stages and portfolio companies, all sourced from confirmed public funding rounds and refreshed monthly.

### Is Shizune's investor data accurate?

Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Aug 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.

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