Tel Aviv-based Pearl Research Labs, the team behind the Pearl proof-of-useful-work L1, has quietly raised $130M without a public announcement. The round reportedly splits into a $55M equity raise and a $75M GPU infrastructure fund, with Lightspeed, Ribbit Capital and Square Peg among the backers.

Pearl miners run matrix multiplications on Nvidia GPUs, the same math behind AI inference, instead of burning energy on hashing. The network went live in April 2026, based on a cryptography paper by CEO Prof. Omri Weinstein (ex-Nvidia) and CTO Prof. Ilan Komargodski.

The PRL token is up roughly 520% over the past three months.

In May, Pearl signed a deal with Together AI, which offers clients a 25% discount on AI jobs run on an open-weights Google model while mining PRL in parallel. The open question is demand: most network activity still comes from sophisticated miners running idle computations purely to earn the token.