Story Protocol raises $54m to simplify IP rights verification

The Story Protocol team, an open-source platform for confirming intellectual property rights, closed a funding round worth $54 million.

The round was led by a16z crypto. The funding also came from Hashed, Endeavor, Samsung Next, Dapper Labs founder Roham Ghareghani and a number of angel investors.

The funds will be used to “democratise the verification of intellectual property rights through a global and scalable repository.”

The team plans to provide on the platform an optimized structure for managing the entire lifecycle of intellectual property, including provenance tracking, licensing and revenue sharing.

Sriram Krishnan, general partner at a16z crypto, said that the project “has the potential to revolutionise the future of intellectual property for artists, fans and developers, expanding creative possibilities at the speed of the internet.”

Story Protocol enables tracking of how IP created on the platform is used and reproduced across environments. It also enables involved parties to share corresponding revenues.

The team expects their protocol to attract third-party developers, who offer the following services to creators:

• crowdfunding;
• capital formation;
• IP discovery;
• licensing modules;
• AI-powered content authentication;
• community growth.

Story Protocol is an open and modular architecture to which any dapp can connect, and its decentralised nature mitigates platform risk for ecosystem developers.

In October 2022, a16z backed the Golden Web3 data-transfer protocol in a $40 million round. In that round, tokens served as compensation for providing and verifying verifiable information.