Access to compute is one of the most consequential and least discussed inequalities of the AI era. The talent to build valuable, public-interest AI exists across the majority world and beyond; the infrastructure to realise it does not reach them. OpenToken is building the layer that connects the two. We route idle, underused and donated GPU capacity to high-impact, public-interest AI projects that could not otherwise afford it, handling vetting, allocation, monitoring and impact reporting end to end. Providers supply the compute; we make it count.
OpenToken was founded by Daniel Rathwell, who has spent fifteen years in international policy across Africa, South Asia and the Gulf. He researches AI ethics and societal issues, with a focus on transformative AI’s implications, at the University of Cambridge.
Professor of Performance Engineering at Cardiff University and one of the UK’s leading figures in high-performance distributed and edge computing, with some 29,000 academic citations and editorial roles at IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. He advises on OpenToken as a distributed computing platform — how we architect, route and scale across a network of providers.
Holds a Cambridge PhD in machine learning and AI, and combines deep technical expertise with two decades across banking, quantitative strategy and startups. He helps sharpen our research taste — guiding philanthropic allocations toward the most promising work — and advises on fundraising and financial sustainability.
Co-founder of LyngualLabs, an African language-AI research lab, an AI researcher at Carnegie Mellon University Africa, and a TEDx speaker, with published work on speech recognition across nineteen African languages. A recipient of OpenToken compute himself, he brings the perspective that matters most — that of the innovators we exist to serve.
As OpenToken establishes itself as a social enterprise with a charitable mission, we are recruiting founding trustees to help build that foundation properly from the outset — particularly people with experience in charity governance, financial oversight, or ethics and responsible technology.
Express interestWe’re always looking for collaborators to advance OpenToken’s mission — whether you have compute to contribute, a project that needs it, or expertise to lend.
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