Seung Yoon Lee, a South Korean startup founder, was in his early 20s when he co-founded Radish Fiction Inc., a US-based mobile fiction platform, in 2016.
SY Lee is now in his early 30s – and is still considered young in Korea’s Confucian society. He is probably a legend in the startup community. He increased the value of another company he co-founded, Story Protocol, to $2.25 billion in just a few years.
On Wednesday, Palo Alto-based startup Programmable IP Labs (PIP Labs), the original lead contributor behind Story Protocol, raised $80 million in a Series B funding round, valuing the startup at $2.25 billion.
The Series B, led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, brought the total amount raised by PIP Labs to $140 million.
Other investors who participated in the latest round included cryptocurrency investor Polychain Capital, Scott Trowbridge, vice president of Stability AI Ltd., Adrian Cheng, founder of K11, digital art collector Cozomo de’ Medici, Hashed and Brevan Howard, a European hedge fund founded by British billionaire Alan Howard.
Korean investors included Samsung Next, an overseas investment arm of Samsung Electronics Co., and Bang Si-hyuck, founder of HYBE Co., the label behind boy band sensation BTS.
BLOCKCHAIN TO PROTECT CREATORS FROM IP THEFT
With the advent of artificial intelligence, intellectual property (IP) has become increasingly valuable as it now serves as fundamental input for large language models and image-generating AI models.
Story Protocol uses blockchain to enable creators and IP owners to assign IP rights and license creative rights, such as copyright.
Blockchain technology has long been used to assign ownership rights to intangible assets such as images and video game assets.
“Without great original intellectual property, AI models don’t evolve,” said Lee, co-founder and CEO of PIP Labs, in a media interview. “AI takes and steals all your data without your consent and profits from it without sharing the rewards with the original developers.”
According to PIP Labs, the Story Protocol blockchain allows developers to declare sovereignty over their IPs through tokenization.
This means they can officially register their IPs on the blockchain, giving them ownership and the ability to set specific rules for how their IPs can be used, shared, or modified. This allows creators to protect their work and maintain control over how others use it.
“The current state of AI destroys the incentive for all of us to create original intellectual property,” he said. “It will certainly have a negative impact on AI if no one has an incentive to create something original that the AI can train on. In the long run, they are inadvertently taking a suicidal step.”
HISTORY PROTOCOL AFTER RADISHES
Lee, a Korean graduate of Oxford University, founded PIP Labs in June 2022 with Jason Zhao of Google Inc.’s AI subsidiary, Google DeepMind Technologies Ltd.
Zhao is now co-founder and chief product officer at PIP Labs.
Before PIP Labs, Lee founded Radish in 2016. Five years later, he sold the mobile fiction platform for 500 billion won to Kakao Entertainment Corp., the operator of technology giant Kakao Corp.’s web novel and comic platform.
After selling Radish to Kakao, Lee briefly worked at Kakao Entertainment as a Global Strategy Officer (GSO) before launching the intellectual property-focused blockchain protocol Story Protocol.
Write to Eun-Yi Ko at [email protected]
In-Soo Nam edited this article.
