Key findings
- Story’s Series B funding round, led by a16z, totals $80 million.
- The company’s goal is to combat intellectual property theft by giving creators control over their intellectual property.
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PIP Labs, the software company behind Story Protocol, a Layer-1 blockchain for intellectual property management, announced Wednesday that it has secured $80 million in a Series B funding round led by a16z with participation from Polychain. The round values PIP Labs at $2.25 billion and brings Story’s total capital raised to $140 million.
Story was created with a mission to transform how intellectual property (IP) is managed in the digital age by making it programmable. The company said it wants to tokenize the $2 trillion IP asset class and turn it into “IP Legos,” a framework for programmable on-chain IP assets.
The protocol aims to solve the problem of big tech companies profiting from creators’ content without fair compensation, said Seung Yoon Lee, co-founder and CEO of PIP Labs. The goal is to empower creators, open up new monetization opportunities, and foster a more collaborative and equitable digital ecosystem.
“The big tech companies are stealing intellectual property without consent and taking all the profits,” Lee explained. “First, they will gobble up your intellectual property for their AI models without getting any compensation. Then they will hijack your future economy by sucking up all your potential traffic.”
“Story will ensure a sustainable and thriving path for internet creativity that benefits both creators and AI, with no middlemen,” he noted.
The platform allows creators to build fan bases that can remix, distribute and sell their intellectual property, Lee said. Creators can declare ownership rights to their intellectual property and set terms of use, opening up new revenue streams through licensing and remixing intellectual property.
Story is designed to work seamlessly with AI, allowing for easier licensing and compensation, the CEO added. Jason Zhao, co-founder and CPO of PIP Labs, described Story as “IP Legoland” where IP can be easily remixed and recomposed.
Chris Dixon, founder and managing partner of a16z crypto, spoke about Story’s potential, saying that the traditional internet economy is changing due to AI and that Story Protocol provides the necessary tools for a new, fairer model where developers are rewarded for their contributions.
“Blockchains are perfectly suited to large-scale economic coordination, and Story’s platform ensures that developers are compensated for the intellectual property they feed into AI systems,” said Dixon.
Story is preparing for its mainnet launch, which is expected later this year. Its development is based on the Cosmos SDK and is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
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