AI giants like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Stability AI have faced plenty of criticism for scraping data and ignoring others' intellectual property when training and running their underlying models. Now, a startup called Story, which announced $83 million in funding, is looking to redress the balance with a blockchain-based platform that allows IP owners to more effectively track usage.
According to CEO and co-founder SY Lee, the aim is to create a more “sustainable” IP ecosystem for the next generation of digital consumers and builders. The startup's approach is to think of IP like Lego and use blockchain to make that possible. “Anyone can fork and remix the IP without permission and reap the benefits,” Lee said in an interview with TechCrunch. (The name “Lego” is a bit ironic, given the many IP battles the toy-building company has faced over the years.)
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, specifically the firm’s a16z crypto division, with participation from crypto investor Polychain Capital, and included Scott Trowbridge (SVP at Stability AI), K11 founder Adrian Chen, and Cosomo de’ Medici (a digital art collector who goes by a pseudonym that evokes a famous Renaissance dynasty). The new funding brings Story’s total raised to $143 million.
Having a better grasp of the value of the IP when it is used could generate significant revenue for licensees. Hopefully, Story itself realizes significant value as the platform catches on and works as expected. The startup is currently valued at $2.25 billion after the funding round, according to a source close to the company.
Story is building what it calls an “IP blockchain”: a system and platform that allows creators to claim ownership of their content, set usage parameters around that IP, and then license it to others for use.
But how that will work in practice remains to be seen. The plan, Li said, is to use the funding to continue developing the product, with the aim of releasing it commercially later this year. So far, the startup has been building its user base through a free, closed beta.
The company says that it has more than 200 teams and “over 20 million addressable IPs” registered on the platform so far, as a result of partnerships with fashion design tool Ablo, Japanese comics platform Sekai, and art collaboration startup Magma.
Chris Dixon, who co-led the a16z investment with Kara Wu, believes that new applications based on generative AI, and other developments like it, will significantly disrupt the economic models that underpin the traditional production of visual art, literature, and music (or any other kind of content that we typically call “content” in today's digitalized world). The theory is that to keep the marketplace for creativity thriving, we need to introduce new ways to monetize content.
“A new wave of AI-powered search engines provide comprehensive answers rather than directing users to websites, and social networks increasingly feature AI-generated images and videos,” Dixon wrote in a blog post. “These AI systems are presumably trained on original human-created content, but often without attribution or citation of sources. Without attribution or compensation, what is the incentive to publish original work on the open internet?”
AI systems are just one area where content is and will be used, but it's an important one. So Story isn't the only player in this space: Last week, another startup called Sahara AI announced $43 million in funding to build out its own approach to how to most effectively track and monetize IP in the AI era.
“Story differentiates itself from Sahara by focusing on the IP and data layer of AI solutions rather than on existing AI infrastructure stacks,” Lee said in response to a question about the differences between the two. “Sahara appears to be targeting intellectual property issues, but these are primarily focused on data, which is quite different from IP legal regimes. Story sees partnership potential as the IP layer of solutions like Sahara and Ritual, where we can be close partners.”
Lee himself has had a front row seat to the story of content in the digital age (so to speak): he started out as an enterprising journalist in the UK, founding the platform byline.com in 2014. He went on to develop crowdsourced serialized fiction app Radish (a competitor to apps like Inkitt and Wattpad), which he eventually sold to Kakao for $440 million.
Story, which Lee co-founded with CPO Jason Chao, is in some ways a natural extension of that experience.
“If you look at everyone from Netflix to Disney, they're spending billions of dollars on content, but they're actually spending billions of dollars on marketing,” he said. “It's kind of a zero-sum war to get more users and more subscribers.”
He said the $440 million acquisition of his previous company, Radish, “made me rethink market dynamics.”
“I spent a lot of my venture capital money on marketing,” he added, saying this is an attempt to build a different model for future creators that avoids that.
Whether it works, and whether creators will want to use it, are questions that remain unanswered.
But those who are confident about how they will invest in future scenarios are bullish.
“What Bitcoin did to money and finance, stories are to content and intellectual property,” Polychain Capital founder and CEO Olaf Carlsson Wee said in a statement. “The first phase of Web3 was driven by the 2008 financial crisis and revolutionized money through networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Now, advances in AI are driving the second phase of Web3, which will revolutionize intellectual property.”