Investing in Story
For decades, the internet has operated on an implicit economic covenant between creators and platforms: creators provide supply, and platforms provide demand. Writers allow search engines to index their articles in the hope of driving traffic to their sites. Artists upload images and videos to social networks to build audiences. The system worked because it benefited both parties.
Advances in generative AI are likely to break this covenant. A new wave of AI-powered search engines give comprehensive answers instead of guiding users to websites. Social networks are increasingly populated by AI-generated images and videos. These AI systems were likely trained on original, human-created content but often don’t credit or cite their sources. If there’s no attribution or compensation, what incentive will there be to publish original creations on the open internet?
Today we’re announcing that a16z crypto is leading an $80M Series B financing of PIP Labs, developer of Story Protocol. Story is a blockchain protocol that allows creators to register their intellectual property so they can track and monitor use, ensuring their legal and economic rights are protected. This means that creators of original content are rewarded, no matter how their content gets used and distributed. Meanwhile, licensing IP becomes low friction and standardized, encouraging widespread sharing and collaboration. The goal is to create foundational infrastructure that can underpin a new economic covenant between creators and platforms.
Some examples of projects that are building on top of Story include Magma, Sekai, and Ablo by Space Runners. Magma is a collaborative art platform enabling artists to register their IP, set the rules of engagement (commercial, remixing, AI usage), and open up assets to contributions from collaborators. Sekai is an AI storytelling platform that helps storytellers, artists, and fans co-create immersive interactive stories via simple prompts. Ablo allows anyone to use generative AI to customize and remix the latest fashions, using Story to handle IP registration and creator attribution, and share revenue between designers and brands.
The team behind Story brings deep expertise from both the tech and creative worlds. We first met CEO/cofounder Seung Yoon Lee three years ago, after he sold his company, Radish Fiction, to Kakao. He has consistently impressed us with his combination of big-picture vision and world-class tactical execution. His cofounder Jason Zhao studied CS at Stanford, dove deeper into AI at DeepMind, and now leads technical development on the Story Protocol.
We hope for a future in which AI systems and creative people can happily co-exist. For this to work, creators need a modern way to ensure they get compensated for their work. Story takes a proven approach — intellectual property law — and updates it for the age of AI. We are excited to support the Story team on this important mission.
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