The fundraise marks the first time a16z has led three rounds in a crypto company since Coinbase.
The rise of artificial intelligence has made the protection of creators’ intellectual property significantly more important in recent times.
Posted on August 21, 2024 at 8:00 am EST.
The company behind Story, a Layer 1 platform that tokenizes intellectual property, announced Wednesday that it raised $80 million in a Series B funding round led by a16z, with additional participation from crypto VC firm Polychain. The fundraise marks the first time a16z has led three funding rounds in a crypto company since investing in centralized exchange Coinbase.
PIP Labs, the first major contributor to Story to officially raise funds, previously raised $29 million in its seed round and $25 million in Series A. Combined with several angel investments, PIP Labs has now raised $140 million. The company did not disclose PIP Labs’ valuation at the time of the latest funding round.
Story estimates that intellectual property is a $2 trillion asset class. And the rise of artificial intelligence has made protecting creators’ intellectual property even more important recently, as this content serves as the basis for training large AI models.
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“Big Tech is stealing intellectual property without consent and pocketing all the profits,” said SY Lee, co-founder and CEO of PIP Labs, in a press release. “The current state of AI completely destroys the incentive to create original intellectual property for all of us. This will certainly have a negative impact on AI if no one has an incentive to create something original for the AI to train on.”
Chris Dixon, founder and managing partner of a16z crypto, echoed Lee’s comments in the press release. “The economic pact underlying the internet – content creators provide supply and content distributors provide demand – is being upended by the proliferation of AI,” Dixon said. “Blockchains are perfectly suited to large-scale economic coordination, and Story’s platform ensures that creators are compensated for their intellectual property that feeds the AI systems.”
Story’s solution is to build the infrastructure to ensure the sovereignty of creators’ intellectual property and to set usage parameters for their content without intermediaries.
“Creators can programmatically declare their sovereign rights and licenses to their intellectual property in computer-readable and writable metadata on a credibly neutral blockchain,” Lee said. “AI models can now license creators’ data and easily compensate them without lawyers and legal documents, making Story a win-win for intellectual property and AI.”
According to the company, over 200 companies representing more than 20 million IPs are currently building on Story in sectors such as IPFi, AI and consumer markets.
Other well-known investors Participants in the latest round of PIP include Scott Trowbridge, SVP and board member of Stability AI, Adrian Cheng, founder of K11, and Cozomo de’ Medici, digital art collector.
