Humayun Sheikh is the CEO and Co-founder of Fetch.ai, an open-source and permissionless network leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to create a decentralized machine-learning system that can execute tasks on the blockchain. ^[1][2]

Education

Humayun Sheikh attended NED University of Engineering and Technology where he received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electrical, Electronics, and Communications Engineering from 1991-1995. ^[2]

From 2003-2004, Humayun attended the Cambridge Judge Entrepreneurship Centre for a Business Administration and Management course. ^[2]

Career

Humayun Sheikh was the Chairman of Mettalis Group, a UK Commodities trading company from 2013-2017. ^[2]

In August 2014, he founded itzMe, a Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence company, and served as the CEO until December 2017. In June 2020, he founded Mettalex & also served as the CEO until June 2022. Humayun was a founding investor in DeepMind where he supported commercialization for early-stage AI & deep neural network technology. ^[2][3]

Fetch.ai

In August 2017, Humayun Sheikh co-founded Fetch.ai, the artificial intelligence lab developing the Fetch.ai platform alongside Toby Simpson and Thomas Hain. Fetch.ai network is an open-access decentralized machine learning blockchain-based network created to enable the development and growth of the digital economy without human interference. The network connects devices and services to the Internet of Things (IoT) and also facilitates the involvement of other agents, such as people. ^[1][2]

Fetch.ai was launched via IEO (Initial Exchange Offering) on Binance in March 2019. The Fetch.ai mainnet went live in January 2020. ^[4]

"I have this passion for taking all these machine learning models, which are going to be the gold, and commercializing them so that everybody can have a participation in it. That was kind of the start of the Fetch journey, and we haven't looked back since then." - Humayun said in an interview with Cryptonews. ^[5]

According to Humayun, the Fetch.ai technology targets various sectors, including those with a decentralized marketplace for service providers such as plumbers and electricians, promising increased efficiency and accessibility for small businesses. ^[6]

"Our objective is to create tools which can enable business cases to be developed and deployed in a decentralized manner and the ability to use ML/AI which can progressively be decentralized" - Humayun posted in an explanatory X thread^[9]

FET Token

The FET token is the native ERC-20 token of the Fetch.ai platform. It is required by autonomous economic agents to perform specific tasks as well as register on the network. FET is used to pay for Fetch.ai services, deploy AI agents, and network transaction fees. Users can also stake FET for a chance to participate in ecosystem security through its proof of stake (PoS) mechanism on the Fetch.ai Ledger to earn rewards. ^[7]

In February 2019, the Fetch.AI (FET) token sale on the crypto exchange Binance’s Launchpad reached its hard cap of $6 million dollars with the sale of over 69 million tokens. In a tweet published the same day, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao reported the sale had been completed within a "dizzying 22 seconds". ^[8]