On August 21, Story's core contributor team PIP Labs announced the completion of an $80 million Series B financing round, led by a16z Crypto and with Polychain Capital participating as a strategic investor.
According to TechCrunch, citing sources, PIP Labs, the developer of the on-chain IP protocol Story Protocol, is currently valued at $2.25 billion after financing.
AI giants like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Stability AI are under pressure for stealing data and grossly infringing on others’ intellectual property when training and running their underlying models. Now, a startup called Story — which announced $80 million in funding today — is bidding to rebalance the landscape with a blockchain-based platform that helps IP owners track usage more efficiently.
The goal, in the words of CEO and co-founder SY Lee, is to build a more “sustainable” IP ecosystem that accommodates the next generation of digital consumers and builders. The startup says its approach is to think of IP as Lego, and use blockchain to do so. “Anyone can fork and remix your IP without permission, and you get to reap the benefits,” Lee told TechCrunch in an interview. (It’s a little ironic to label it “Lego,” given the many IP disputes the toy building block company has faced over the years.)
The company said that through partnerships with fashion design tool Ablo, Japanese manga platform Sekai, and art collaboration startup Magma, it has registered more than 200 teams and “over 20 million addressable IPs” on the platform to date.
The power of IP
As a common phenomenon in the cryptocurrency industry, it is impossible to verify whether Story's $140 million financing is "watered down". But considering the huge industry of IP, if Story succeeds, a valuation of $2.25 billion may be normal, after all, "one Iron Man can save the entire Marvel." According to statistics from Wiki&Mili, among the 50 most profitable IPs in the world in 2023, the "Pokemon" IP brought in as much as $88 billion in revenue for the Pokemon Company and Nintendo.
However, Jason Zhao told Fortune that Story is unlikely to attract IP giants like Disney. The platform was built to attract "secondary IP" creators. "This generation of creators using AI tools is like the previous Internet celebrities, who are not valued by traditional brands," Zhao said. "Similar to the situation with YouTube, YouTube did not rely on big directors like Spielberg, but on YouTubers who uploaded videos on their mobile phones. 15 years later, YouTube became 'MrBeast'."
Whether Story can become the "YouTube" that Jason mentioned remains to be seen. It is worth noting that after the financing news was announced, the floor price of the NFT released by Story to commemorate ETHDenver 2024 was hyped up several times.
Story values ownership, which is also what a16z values
As the leader of the Web3 narrative, a16z has published many profound insights about Web3. From Chris Dixon's description of Web3's "readable, writable and ownable" characteristics, it is not difficult to see that he attaches great importance to the concept of ownership. Chris Dixon pointed out in his investment article that "for decades, the Internet has reached an implicit economic contract between creators and platforms, that is, creators bring supply, and platforms provide demand." However, "the development of generative artificial intelligence is likely to break this agreement," greatly damaging the interests of creators. Story, which aims to protect creators' ownership, may have hit Chris Dixon's heart for this reason. As Jason Zhao explained when explaining why Story was built as L1, "the next generation of blockchain infrastructure needs to be "built for a specific purpose." A16z values Story's concept rather than technology.
Story Protocol is a blockchain protocol that allows creators to register their intellectual property so that usage can be tracked and monitored to ensure that their legal and economic rights are protected. Story Protocol's founding team is from South Korea and has three co-founders. "SY" Lee serves as CEO. "SY" Lee once built a mobile serialized novel app called Radish, which was eventually sold to Kakao for $440 million. Jason Levy serves as COO. Jason Levy worked as a financial analyst at Apple for 5 years and founded the mobile entertainment startup Worlds Between Worlds. Jason Zhao is the protocol leader of Story Protocol. Jason Zhao previously studied computer science at Stanford University and then studied artificial intelligence at DeepMind. He is currently responsible for the technical development of Story Protocol.
Among Story Protocol’s investors, in addition to a16z crypto, there are also well-known investors such as Samsung Next Fund, Adrian Cheng, executive director of Chow Tai Fook Group, and dao5
Why do you tag IPs on Story Network?
There are several significant benefits to tokenizing IP on Story Network:
1. Liquidity - IP can be traded or used as collateral, creating new financial opportunities.
2. Programmability - Automated operations such as royalty payments can be embedded in IP NFTs to simplify management.
3. Transparency - The underlying blockchain provides clear and immutable records of IP ownership and transactions.
For developers, they can build applications that leverage tokenized IP. Think AI model marketplaces, content remix platforms, and DeFi applications that use IP NFTs as collateral.
Two of the earliest examples of applications in the Story ecosystem are Magma, a collaborative design tool that uses the Story Network to manage and monetize creative works through NFTs, and Mahojin, a platform for AI training data and models.
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