Story raises $80M for blockchain-based IP network to address creative ownership in the AI era

Programmable IP Labs, the core contributor to the intellectual property-tracking blockchain network Story Protocol, today said it has raised $80 million in new funding.

The Series B round, led by a16 crypto, brought the total raised by PIP to $140 million, including $54 million from a previous round also led by the crypto arm of Andreessen Horowitz in September 2023. Other investors participating in the round included Polychain, Stability AI Ltd. Vice President Scott Trowbridge, K11 Founder Adrian Cheng and digital art collector Cozomo de’ Medici.

Intellectual property represents anything made by people, not just big-billed creative projects such as Hollywood movies, music playing on the radio and video games, PIP Labs argues. It includes the artwork, music, articles, writing and everyday memes generated by normal people. With the rise of artificial intelligence, IP has become ever more valuable, as it now serves as the foundational input for large language models and image-generating AI models.

“Big tech is stealing IP without consent and capturing all the profit,” said SY Lee, co-founder and chief executive of PIP Labs. “First, they will gobble up your IP for their AI models without any compensation back. Then, they will hijack your future economics by sucking in all your potential traffic. At least, in the past, Google was kind enough to drive some traffic to your content, and that still killed many local newspapers.”

In its current state, AI has both positive and negative effects. In one way it gives the ability to quickly create vivid and beautiful images without much effort, mere words can summon forth the imaginative and the beautiful. However, on the other side, Lee notes that if model developers do not provide an incentive for creators to share their works and pay them for their labor, that pool of human creativity will dry up.

“The current state of AI completely destroys the incentive to create original IP for all of us,” said Lee. “This surely will be negative for AI if no one has incentive to create something original for AI to train upon. They are inadvertently taking a suicidal action in the long run.”

The Story Protocol uses blockchain to provide attribution for IP rights as well as creative rights licensing such as copyright for creators and IP owners. Blockchain technology has long been used to attribute intangibles with ownership including images and video game assets. One famous example is the digital artist Beeple’s artwork “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” which was attributed as a blockchain nonfungible token and sold for $69 million in 2021.

One of the benefits of blockchain technology is that it runs peer-to-peer and allows for the creation of programmable, readable and writable metadata that can represent IP rights and agreements between parties.

Developers can use the Story Protocol to take IP rights, assets and licenses and turn them into automated royalty payments, allowing them to be integrated into applications for easy sharing of IP rights. PIP says this will unlock new revenue streams for creators that didn’t exist before and with blockchain technology tracking attribution for the creative works, AI model developers can compensate them fairly without the need for lawyers or middlemen.

“Think of Story as an IP Legoland,” said Jason Zhao, co-founder and chief product officer at PIP Labs. “On Story’s blockchain, IP turns into IP Legos — programmable, on-chain assets, ready for remixing and composing across thousands of applications. IP Legos and generative AI are yin and yang. Give fans exciting IP Legos to play around with and the magic wand of generative AI, they can create the next exciting spinoff space opera films, sequel hardcore games, remixed house music and trendy fashion design.”

Since launch, more than 200 teams, totaling more than 20 million intellectual property assets, are already building on Story across various industries, including AI and consumer markets. Space Runners’ Albo, an AI fashion design tool backed by Polychain and Pantera, is building on the platform to allow anyone in the world to customize the latest fashion with the power of generative AI in collaboration with major brands.

 Image: PIP Labs